Cibrarp  of  Che  'theological  ^eroinarp 

PRINCETON  •  NEW  JERSEY 


PRESENTED  BY 

John  Stuart  Conning,  D.D. 

DS  141  . E63  1921 
Enelow,  H.  G.  1877-1934. 
The  Jew  and  the  world 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 

ASPECTS  OF  THE  BIBLE 

THE  JEWISH  LIFE 

THE  SYNAGOGUE  IN  MODERN  LIFE 

THE  VARIED  BEAUTY  OF  THE  PSALMS 

THE i  EFFECTS  OF  RELIGION 

THE  FAITH  OF  ISRAEL 

THE  ALLIED  COUNTRIES  AND  THE  JEWS 
THE  WAR  AND  THE  BIBLE 

A  JEWISH  VIEW  OF  JESUS 
THE  ADEQUACY  OF  JUDAISM 


THE  JEW  AND  THE  WORLD 


The  Jew 
and  the  World 

JPy 

H.  G.  ENELOW 


BLOCH  PUBLISHING  COMPANY 
NEW  YORK 
1921 


■ 

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TO 

Mr.  LOUIS  MARSHALL 

FAITHFUL  AND  FEARLESS  CHAMPION 
OF  THE  JEW  IN  THE  WORLD 


“Break  up  your  fallow  ground,  and  sow  not  among 
thorns !  ” — Jeremiah. 


“Under  the  green  foliage  and  blossoming  fruit- 
trees  of  Today,  there  lie  forests  of  all  other  Years 
and  Days.” — Carlyle. 


“Every  true  history  is  contemporary  history.” 

— Benedetto  Croce. 


“We  cannot  know  how  much  we  learn 
From  those  who  never  will  return, 

Until  a  flash  of  unforeseen 
Remembrance  falls  on  what  has  been.” 

— Edwin  A.  Robinson. 


CONTENTS 


I  Jacob,  or  the  Question  of  Jewish 

Characteristics .  13 

II  Moses,  or  the  Jew's  Service  to  the 

World  . 23 

III  Amalek,  or  the  World's  Hostility 

toward  the  Jew .  33 

IV  Is  Jesus  the  Light  of  the  World? .  41 

V  The  Universal  Importance  of  Ibn 

Gebirol  .  51 

VI  The  Jewish  Interest  of  Dante .  63 

VII  The  Pilgrims  and  the  Jews .  75 

VIII  Napoleon,  or  the  Place  of  the  Jew 

in  the  Modern  World .  85 

IX  Adolph  Jellinek,  or  the  Ideal  of  a 

Modern  Rabbi  .  97 

X  The  Jew  and  the  World .  107 


I 


JACOB 

.  OR  THE  QUESTION 
OF  JEWISH  CHARACTERISTICS 

“He  said  unto  me:  ‘Thou  art  My  ser¬ 
vant,  Israel,  in  whom  I  will  be  glori¬ 
fied/  ” — Isaiah  49,  3. 

THE  stories  of  the  Jewish  Patri¬ 
archs,  which  fill  the  first  book  of 
the  Bible,  often  have  been  said  to 
typify  Jewish  history  and  Jewish  char¬ 
acter.  In  fact,  the  ancient  rabbis  antici¬ 
pated  the  modern  critic.  “The  lives  of 
the  fathers”,  they  maintained,  “repeated 
themselves  in  their  offspring.”  And  this 
is  particularly  true  of  the  story  of  Jacob. 
In  it  we  see  a  foreshadowing,  a  summa¬ 
tion,  of  Jewish  history,  a  portrayal  of 
the  Jewish  character. 

But  is  there  such  a  thing  as  a  distinct 
Jewish  character,  and,  if  so,  what  are  its 
dominant  traits?  This  is  a  question  we 
might  well  try  to  answer  at  present,  see¬ 
ing  that  the  world  is  full  of  all  kinds  of 
affirmations,  both  friendly  and  hostile, 
concerning  the  characteristics  of  the 
Jew. 


13 


A  careful  observer  will  have  to  admit 
that  physically  there  are  no  universal 
Jewish  characteristics. 

Of  course,  some  men  still  believe  that 
all  Jews  belong  to  the  same  physical 
type.  But  scientific  students  have  aban¬ 
doned  long  ago  the  notion  of  a  uniform 
Jewish  type.  Indeed,  few  (if  any)  an¬ 
thropologists  believe  that  there  is  such  a 
thing  as  a  pure  Jewish  race.  The  word 
race,  as  far  as  the  Jews  are  concerned, 
has  chiefly  an  historical  meaning:  the 
Jews  are  one  race,  because  for  thousands 
of  years  they  have  had  a  common  his¬ 
tory,  resulting  in  certain  psychic  peculi¬ 
arities.  Physically,  however,  the  Jews 
have  not  been  secluded.  From  the  very 
beginning  they  have  lost  and  gained  by 
contact  with  the  world.  Even  in  the 
ghetto  they  could  not  escape  their  sur¬ 
roundings.  They  are  not  a  biologic  curi¬ 
osity. 

Contrary  to  the  common  assumption, 
all  Jews  do  not  look  alike.  They  have  been 
influenced  by  climate  and  environment. 
Some  Jews  have  preserved  the  Semitic 
type,  others  look  Germanic,  or  Slavic,  or 
Italian,  or  American.  Indeed,  some  years 

14 


ago,  in  China,  a  community  of  Jews  was 
discovered  who  looked  exactly  like  the 
Chinese;  their  synagogue  and  its  wor¬ 
ship  alone  stamped  them  as  Jews.  Only 
recently,  the  inscriptions  on  the  walls  of 
their  synagogue  at  Kai-fung-foo,  as  well 
as  two  tablets  discovered  there,  were 
published  in  an  English  translation, 
throwing  light  upon  their  history  and 
patriotism,  as  well  as  upon  the  high  con¬ 
ception  of  the  spiritual  and  moral  impli¬ 
cates  of  their  religion  that  prevailed 
among  them. 

Nor  are  the  mental  characteristics  of 
the  Jews  uniform. 

Careful  students,  time  and  again, 
have  expressed  the  difficulty  of  forming 
a  definite  judgment  on  the  character  of 
a  nation  or  of  a  people;  though  the  in¬ 
cautious  person  is  most  ready  to  make 
general  pronouncements.  “What  people, 
for  example,”  asks  M.  Finot,  “has  been 
more  studied  than  the  ancient  Greeks? 
Yet  in  spite  of  all  the  sides  of  its  life 
thus  opened  to  our  gaze,  we  are  unable 
to  furnish  an  exact  definition  of  its 
soul.”  According  to  Renan,  the  Greeks 

15 


were  the  least  religious  people  in  the 
world.  According  to  Fustel  de  Coulan- 
ges,  the  Greek  life  incarnated  the  reli¬ 
gious  life  par  excellence. 

The  same  certainly  may  be  said  of  the 
Jews.  Hasty  theorists  are  fond  of  gen¬ 
eralizing  about  them.  Whether  their  ut¬ 
terances  cohere  does  not  seem  to  matter. 
The  Jews  have  been  alternately  styled 
socialists  and  individualists,  legalists 
and  anarchists,  particularists  and  inter¬ 
nationalists,  radicals  and  ultra-conserva¬ 
tives.  The  more  one  knows  about  the 
Jews,  however,  the  more  one  will  hesi¬ 
tate  to  attribute  to  all  Jews  the  same 
mental  qualities. 

For  example,  some  people  hold  that  all 
Jews  are  materialists  and  shrewd  money 
makers.  Yet,  even  a  tyro  in  Jewish  his¬ 
tory  could  name  many  a  Jew;  who  was 
anything  but  that.  Surely,  Jeremiah 
was  not  a  materialist,  nor  a  shrewd  bus¬ 
iness  man;  nor  was  Jesus;  nor  was  Ab¬ 
raham  Ibn  Ezra,  the  medieval  poet  and 
philosopher,  who  was  so  poor  and  withal 
so  unlucky  as  to  say  of  himself  that  if 

16 


he  dealt  in  candles  the  sun  would  cease 
setting,  and  if  he  dealt  in  shrouds, 
people  would  die  no  more;  nor  was  Spi¬ 
noza  an  unconscionable  capitalist.  Yet 
they  were  all  born  and  bred  as  Jews; 
and  Jewish  history  is  full  of  men  of 
their  type,  though  not  of  equal  celebrity. 

Even  so  careful  a  writer  as  Mr.  Have¬ 
lock  Ellis,  in  the  Introduction  to  his  book 
on  The  New  Spirit,  speaks  of  “that  most 
material  Hebrew  race.”  Yet,  he  pro¬ 
ceeds  forthwith  to  clothe  some  of  his 
own  exalted  thoughts  in  language  bor¬ 
rowed  from  the  Bible  of  that  race.  Ad¬ 
vising  us  to  set  our  shoulder  joyously  to 
the  world’s  wheel,  he  assures  us  that  we 
shall  spare  ourselves  some  unhappiness, 
if  beforehand  we  slip  the  book  of  Ec¬ 
clesiastes  beneath  our  arm,  and,  in  fine, 
he  depicts  Heinrich  Heine  as  the  most 
characteristic  and  melodious  exponent 
of  the  new  spirit,  to  whom  he  feels  him¬ 
self  drawn  with  cords  of  a  peculiar  per¬ 
sonal  tenderness,  and  whose  ideal,  Mr. 
Ellis  says,  was  the  harmony  of  flesh  and 
spirit,  meaning  by  flesh  the  Greek  ele¬ 
ment,  and  by  spirit,  the  Hebrew  element, 
in  life.  If  from  the  pages  of  so  con- 

17 


scientious  a  champion  of  the  scientific 
spirit  such  incongruities  stare  at  us, 
what,  pray,  shall  we  expect  from  those 
less  trained  to  logic?  “Words,”  says 
Siegfried  Sassoon, 

“Words  are  fools 

Who  follow  blindly,  once  they  get  a  lead. 

But  thoughts  are  kingfishers  that  haunt  the  pools 

Of  quiet.” 

The  fact  is  that  originally  the  Jew 
was  a  farmer,  and  not  a  merchant.  In 
Palestine  the  Jews  remained  an  agricul¬ 
tural  people  to  the  end.  Though  their 
country  was  on  the  main  trade  route  of 
the  ancient  world,  they  never  became  a 
commercial  people.  The  Prophets  in¬ 
veighed  against  the  spread  of  commer¬ 
cialism  and  against  the  worship  of 
wealth,  denouncing  them  as  foreign  im¬ 
portations.  Conditions  of  life  gradually 
turned  Jews  into  merchants,  and  even 
then  capacity  for  business  neither  be¬ 
came  their  chief  mental  characteristic, 
nor  served  to  make  them  the  only  great 
merchants  of  the  world.  In  the  Middle 
Ages,  though  some  imagine  that  the 
Jews  were  nothing  but  a  crowd  of 
money-lenders,  they  engaged  in  diverse 

18 


trades  and  professions,  according  as 
they  were  allowed  so  to  do,  while  all  the 
world  knows,  or  ought  to  know,  that 
during  those  dark  centuries  they  pro¬ 
duced  an  endless  number  of  rabbis, 
scientists,  and  philosophers,  many  of 
whom  rendered  eminent  service  to  so¬ 
ciety  as  well  as  the  sciences.  And  today, 
too,  neither  are  all  Jews  rich  merchants, 
nor  are  all  the  rich  merchants  Jews. 

i  *  -  '  . 

I 

Is  there,  then,  any  particular  quality 
that  stamps  the  Jew  as  Jew — that  forms 
a  universal  and  permanent  characteris¬ 
tic  of  the  Jewish  people? 

Yes,  there  is.  It  is  the  spiritual  ideal¬ 
ism  of  the  Jew.  “The  universal  religion 
of  mankind,”  exclaims  Edouard  Schure, 
the  French  mystic,  “was  the  true  mis¬ 
sion  of  Israel!”  “Though  few  Jews  seem 
to  know  it,”  he  adds  complainingly.  But 
how  many  non- Jews  know  it? 

This  is  what  set  the  Jew  apart  from 
his  neighbor  at  the  very  beginning  of 
his  history.  He  separated  from  the  rest 
of  the  Semitic  world  because  of  his  spir¬ 
itual  conceptions,  of  his  religious  pur¬ 
pose.  In  this  sense,  as  some  one  has  said, 

19 

* 


he  was  the  first  anti-Semite,  in  that  he 
opposed  the  religious  ideas  and  practices 
of  the  other  Semites.  And  nothing  but 
steadfast  and  intrepid  adherence  to  his 
spiritual  idealism  has  preserved  the 
Jew  in  the  world.  Nor  is  there  anything 
but  this  to  stamp  the  Jew  as  Jew.  The 
more  loyal  a  Jew  is  to  the  spiritual  pur¬ 
poses  of  Israel,  the  more  true  a  Jew  he 
is.  When  he  abandons  that  spiritual 
idealism,  he  ceases  to  be  a  Jew — or  a 
factor  in  the  preservation  of  the  Jewish 
people. 

This  is  the  inward  meaning  of  the  life 
of  Jacob  as  portrayed  in  the  early 
stories  of  the  Bible.  He  is  not  presented 
as  a  perfect  man — of  course  not.  Not 
one  of  the  heroes  of  the  Jewish  Bible 
is  so  presented.  He  is  human.  Before  he 
attains  to  spiritual  grandeur  and  ethical 
power,  he  has  to  pass  through  suffering 
and  struggle,  through  sin  and  servitude 
and  strife  (as  all  other  saints  have  had 
to  do).  But  from  the  very  outset  he  is 
the  man  of  spiritual  intuition  and  ethi¬ 
cal  capacity.  Ya’aqob  ish  tarn  yoshebh  oha- 
lim.  Jacob,  said  the  rabbis,  was  devoted 

20 


to  the  tents  of  tradition  and  study,  or, 
as  Don  Isaac  Abravanel  construed  it,  to 
mental  and  moral  self-perfection. 

Similarly,  the  Jew  of  history  may  not 
be  perfect — may  have  had  to  struggle 
and  to  suffer  as  the  price  of  his  gran¬ 
deur.  But  from  the  very  start  he  has 
stood  out  pre-eminent  for  his  spiritual 
capacity  and  ethical  idealism,  and  inso¬ 
far  as  he  has  imbued  civilization  with 
his  ethical  and  spiritual  ideal,  he  has 
been  the  benefactor  of  mankind.  “Of  all 
ancient  races,”  says  Professor  Genung, 
“the  Hebrew  race  was  pre-eminent  for 
the  depth,  the  clearness,  the  intensity  of 
its  spiritual  intuitions”;  “and  this,”  he 
adds  “was  their  undying  gift  to  human¬ 
ity.” 

And  this  is  our  great  task  today.  We 
have  still  to  suffer  and  to  fight.  Still  we 
encounter  misunderstanding  ana  mis¬ 
representation.  But  let  us  remain  true 
to  our  spiritual  heritage,  let  us  cham¬ 
pion  and  cherish  our  historical  ideals, 
and,  like  Jacob  of  old,  we  shall  prevail 
with  God  and  Man! 


21 


II 


MOSES, 

OR  THE 

JEW’S  SERVICE  TO  THE  WORLD 

“This  people  I  formed  for  Myself  that 
they  might  set  forth  My  praise.” 

— Isaiah  43,  21. 

IT  is  a  question  of  perennial  import 
whether  the  Jew  has  really  rendered 
any  substantial  service  to  mankind, 
and  if  so,  what  this  service  has  been.  An 
answer  is  offered  by  the  personality 
which  looms  up  before  us  at  the  threshold 
of  Jewish  history — the  personality  of 
Moses,  who  may  well  be  regarded  as  the 
symbol  of  the  Jew’s  work  and  as  the 
embodiment  of  the  Jew’s  mission  in  the 
world. 

In  the  last  few  years  we  have  wit¬ 
nessed  a  great  change  in  men’s  attitude 
to  Moses. 

A  generation  ago  it  was  fashionable 
to  disparage  his  work,  and  even  to  ques¬ 
tion  his  existence.  The  so-called  higher 
critics  found  but  little  room  for  him  in 
their  compositions.  When  Rabbi  Isaac 

23 


M.  Wise  was  wont  to  extol  Moses,  he 
was  considered  unlearned  and  old-fogey. 

But  we  have  lived  to  see  a  reaction 
from  those  views.  People  are  turning- 
their  attention  anew  to  Moses — they  are 
studying  the  various  manifestations  of 
his  genius — they  are  writing  new  books 
on  his  outstanding  qualities  as  social  or¬ 
ganizer,  as  legislator,  as  strategist,  and 
as  “the  father  of  preventive  medicine.” 
They  are  finding  out  afresh  that  he  was 
as  great  a  man  and  leader  as  the  world 
has  known. 

Yet,  if  we  tried  to  sum  up  in  one  word 
the  achievement  of  Moses,  we  might  say 
that  it  lay  in  what  he  did  for  the 
triumph  of  true  Religion  in  the  world. 

The  rabbis  say  that  when  the  Holy 
One  created  the  world,  He  was  eager  to 
have  a  dwelling  on  earth  as  well  as  in 
heaven.  But  the  errors  and  misdeeds  of 
human  beings  caused  Him  to  move  His 
Presence  farther  and  farther  away  from 
them.  When  Abraham  arose,  he  began 
to  draw  the  Divine  Presence  back  tow¬ 
ard  mankind,  until  finally  Moses  brought 
it  down  to  the  earth:  “And  the  Lord 
came  down  upon  Mount  Sinai.” 

24  ' 


Thus  the  rabbis  expressed  what  mod¬ 
ern  scholars  again  are  learning  to  de¬ 
scribe  as  the  great  merit  of  Moses.  He 
saved  Religion  for  the  world,  Religion 
which  had  indeed  sprung  up  among  the 
ancestors  of  the  Jewish  people,  but  re¬ 
quired  new  energy  and  direction,  in  or¬ 
der  not  to  perish  from  the  earth.  Moses, 
says  Edouard  Schure,  made  Israel  the 
instrument  of  the  universal  religion  he 
sought  to  diffuse  and  perpetuate  among 
men.  Thus,  when  Moses  defeated  Pha¬ 
raoh  and  saved  Israel,  he  became  not 
merely  the  leader  of  his  own  people  buc 
the  benefactor  of  the  human  race. 

Moreover,  the  religion  of  Moses  pos¬ 
sessed  special  characteristics,  which  he 
accentuated  and  which,  undoubtedly, 
have  had  their  effect  upon  the  Jewish 
character  and  upon  the  history  of  the 
human  race. 

The  religion  of  Moses  was  founded, 
first  of  all,  upon  the  doctrine  of  freedom. 
Liberty,  taught  Moses,  was  not  merely  a 
political  or  economic  question :  it  was  a 
religious  question — a  Divine  concern. 
There  is  something  thrilling  and  sublime 

25 


about  the  story  of  Moses's  mission,  as 
related  in  the  book  of  Exodus.  Moses 
discovers  the  God  of  his  ancestors  and 
the  demand  of  freedom  simultaneously. 
God’s  voice  and  liberty’s  voice  are  one. 
It  is  God  that  tells  Moses  of  His  own 
sympathy  with  the  enslaved  people,  and 
sends  Moses  to  free  them.  Hotse  eth  ammi 
me-Mitsrayim.  “Bring  forth  my  people 
from  Egypt!” — this  is  the  first  com¬ 
mand  he  receives. 

Is  there  any  other  founder  of  a  reli¬ 
gion  in  which  the  motives  of  divinity 
and  liberty  are  so  wholly  blended  to¬ 
gether?  And  was  this  a  mere  accident? 
By  no  means.  The  same  note  rings 
through  the  entire  structure  of  Moses’s 
religion.  Liberty — it  is  part  of  divinity, 
part  of  Religion.  Man  is  made  free,  and 
free  he  must  remain.  One  only  is  Mas¬ 
ter — God:  Him  ye  shall  serve,  but  ye 
shall  not  serve  Pharaoh;  ye  shall  not  be 
slaves ! 

The  passion  for  freedom,  as  part  of 
the  creation  and  the  constitution  of 
man,  which  throbs  through  all  moni¬ 
tions  of  Moses,  has  become  part  of  the 

26 


influence  exerted  by  Moses  upon  the  Jew 
and  upon  other  races  of  mankind.  In¬ 
deed,  his  name  has  become  a  synonym  for 
liberty. 

Yet  the  same  lover  and  apostle  of 
freedom  also  spoke  of  the  conditions 
needful  to  its  preservation.  In  the  teach¬ 
ing  of  Moses  there  was  no  confusion  of 
liberty  and  license.  There  must  be  law, 
in  order  that  liberty  might  live. 

Oh,  how  many  have  not  misjudged 
and  belittled  Judaism  on  the  ground  that 
it  laid  too  much  stress  on  law!  Judaism 
is  legalism,  they  cry,  and  who  wants 
that  kind  of  religion?  But  the  deeper 
the  experience  of  mankind,  the  more  it 
realizes  the  need  of  law  as  a  means  of 
preserving  freedom — law  for  the  indi¬ 
vidual,  law  for  nations,  law  for  human¬ 
ity.  Throw  off  all  laws,  and  you  end  by 
losing  freedom. 

Is  not  this  the  lesson  which  the  her¬ 
oine  of  Miss  Stern’s  story  “Debatable 
Ground”  is  taught  by  her  long  and  var¬ 
ied  experience?  Many  years  she  has 
spent  spurning  tradition,  law,  restraint. 

27 


She  has  sought  to  be  “modern.”  But  her 
own  experience  has  opened  her  eyes  to 
the  need  of  laws,  guidance,  standards  of 
conduct,  for  the  sake  of  true  freedom 
and  felicity.  Her  young  daughter,  she  de¬ 
clares,  she  means  to  bring  up  in  the  old 
way,  with  a  realization  of  right  and 
wrong,  good  and  bad,  with  signposts 
wherever  she  may  stop  and  wonder.  She 
will  not  hesitate  to  lay  down  rules,  to 
ask  questions,  to  forbid,  and  to  be 
shocked  whenever  there  is  cause  for  be¬ 
ing  shocked.  She  will  not  allow  her 
daughter  to  grow  up  stumbling  for¬ 
wards  and  backwards  in  a  spiritual 
twilight. 

Moses  was  a  great  religious  teacher, 
because  he  saw  this.  Emancipator  he 
was;  but  also  lawgiver;  the  two  parts 
went  together.  The  one  was  for  the  sake 
of  the  other,  and  both  together  for  the 
good  and  glory  of  mankind.  Heruth 
(freedom)  and  Haruth  (engraved  upon 
the  Tables  of  the  Law),  the  rabbis  re¬ 
mind  us,  are  spelt  alike.  The  Hebrew 
consonants  are  the  same;  only  the 
vowels  differ.  Law  and  Liberty  are 
rooted  together. 


28 


Nor  will  the  true  student  of  Moses’s 
religion  overlook  another  of  its  features, 
though  it  has  often  been  denied.  The 
religion  of  Moses  was  founded  on  love. 

Of  course,  one  often  hears  the  con¬ 
trary  assertion.  Time  and  again  one 
hears  it  affirmed  that  the  religion  of 
Moses  was  a  religion  of  fear — of  intimi¬ 
dation — of  punishment,  and  that  the 
Jews  never  knew  of  love  as  a  factor  in 
Religion  until  Jesus  came.  It  horrifies 
some  of  our  modern  apostles  to  speak  of 
Moses  in  this  connection. 

A  foreign  bishop,  addressing  a  large 
group  of  clergymen  the  other  day,  and 
unaware,  no  doubt,  of  the  presence  of  a 
rabbi,  dwelt  on  his  observations  of  reli¬ 
gious  life  in  this  country.  One  thing,  he 
said,  amazed  him,  namely,  that  in  Amer¬ 
ica  Christian  ministers  sometimes  speak 
of  the  religion  of  Moses  and  of  other 
religions  in  wellnigh  the  same  terms  of 
respect  as  of  the  religion  of  Jesus.  Such 
conduct  this  bishop,  who  by  his  hosts 
was  hailed  as  a  veritable  prophet  of 
spirituality,  regarded  as  most  lament¬ 
able  and  dangerous. 

29 


Yet  it  is  strange  that  Jesus  himself 
showed  no  such  dread  of  the  precepts  of 
Moses.  When  he  was  asked  to  define 
Religion,  he  used  verses  from  Moses. 
And  what  was  the  leading  word  in  those 
verses?  Love!  “Thou  shalt  love  the 
Lord  thy  God!”  “Thou  shalt  love  thy 
neighbor!”  These  utterances  of  Moses, 
Jesus  told  his  disciple,  are  the  essence  of 
Religion. 

Indeed,  Moses  founded  his  Religion 
on  love.  But  it  was  not  the  love  of  a 
sentimentalist  who  ignores  the  facts  of 
life  and  the  laws  that  must  govern  con¬ 
duct  ;  it  was  the  love  of  a  strong  man,  in 
which  mind  and  conscience  have  a  part, 
as  well  as  emotion. 

And  this  is  the  chief  service  of  the 
Jew  to  the  world.  He  gave  Religion  to 
mankind — founded  on  liberty,  fortified 
by  law,  and  suffused  with  love.  Moses 
stands  out  as  the  everlasting  symbol  of 
that  service. 

And  the  world  still  needs  this  kind  of 
Religion.  We  of  today  need  such  a  Reli¬ 
gion  as  Moses  taught.  Liberty — law — 
love!  How  much  the  world  needs  them! 

30 


Religion,  rather  than  idolatry,  true  Reli¬ 
gion — is  there  anything  we  need  more 
than  this?  At  such  a  time  let  us  hearken 
afresh  to  the  voice  of  Moses,  and  let  us 
make  it  heard  among  men! 


31 


Ill 


AMALEK, 

OR  THE  WORLD’S 
HOSTILITY  TOWARD  THE  JEW 

(For  Purim ) 

'‘But  even  in  those  days,  saith  the  Lord, 

I  will  not  make  a  full  end  with  you.” 

— Jeremiah  5,  18. 

THE  Sabbath  preceding  the  feast  of 
Purim  is  called  the  Sabbath  of  Re¬ 
membrance.  From  time  immemorial 
it  has  served  as  an  occasion  for  recalling 
the  strange  vicissitudes  of  Jewish  his¬ 
tory,  and  especially  the  many  outbreaks 
of  hostility  which,  ever  since  the  days  of 
Amalek,  have  been  directed  against  the 
Jew.  Thus  it  formed  a  proper  prelude 
to  Purim — in  some  ways  the  most  typi¬ 
cal  of  Jewish  festivals. 

But  at  present  Purim  takes  on  a  new 
meaning.  It  reminds  us  not  merely  of 
old  battles  and  woes,  but  also  of  what 
is  going  on  right  now,  round  about  us 
and  all  over  the  world,  of  the  new  burst 
of  antipathy  from  which  the  Jew  has 
had  to  suffer — of  the  tens  of  thousands 
who  have  been  overwhelmed  by  the  new 

33 


wave  of  hatred.  Under  the  circum¬ 
stances,  Purim  does  not  only  derive  sig¬ 
nificance  from  the  past;  it  has  a  new 
meaning. 

But  the  Sabbath  of  Remembrance, 
also,  has  a  new  meaning.  It  bids  us  re¬ 
member,  even  more  than  the  assaults  of 
the  Amaleks  of  all  the  ages,  the  qualities 
we  need  in  order  to  face  the  present  sit¬ 
uation  manfully,  in  a  way  worthy  of 
those  who  have  fallen  heir  to  the  glori¬ 
ous  exemplars  of  the  Jewish  past. 

It  would  be  even  harder  to  understand 
the  present-day  persecution  of  the  Jews 
if  we  did  not  consider  the  general  con¬ 
dition  of  mankind. 

The  fact  is  that  the  whole  world  is 
sick — suffering  materially  and  spiritual¬ 
ly.  Since  the  Armistice,  there  has  been 
not  only  political  and  economic  collapse; 
there  has  been  a  frightful  spiritual  con¬ 
fusion.  Mankind  has  come  down  from 
the  heights  of  idealism.  There  is  misery 
all  over  the  world,  and,  as  always  has 
happened  in  such  cases,  the  Jew  is  suf¬ 
fering  most.  This  is  one  thing  History 

34 


(to  which  in  these  days  of  perplexity  so 
many  are  turning  for  counsel)  bids  us 
remember:  the  Jew  has  always  suffered 
most — in  times  of  calamity,  of  misfor¬ 
tune,  he  has  had  to  bear  the  heaviest 
burdens.  Always  he  has  been  the  Suffer¬ 
ing  Servant,  as  Isaiah  called  him.  And 
true  to  his  history,  in  spite  of  our  expec¬ 
tations  during  the  war,  the  Jew  is  suf¬ 
fering  most  now. 

So  much  the  more  do  we  need  to  re¬ 
member  the  lessons  of  Purim.  For  Pu- 
rim  tells  us,  first  of  all,  to  remain  true 
and  loyal — to  cling  to  our  convictions. 

What  is  behind  this  long  and  check¬ 
ered  history  of  the  Jew?  Why  has  he 
been  persecuted  and  why  has  he  per¬ 
severed?  Behind  it  all  there  is  only  one 
cause — his  faith,  his  religious  beliefs 
and  ideals,  whatever  the  world  may  say 
to  the  contrary.  It  is  related  by  the  rab¬ 
bis  that  when  the  Midianites  made  war 
on  Israel  at  the  very  dawn  of  his  history, 
Moses  exclaimed:  “0  Lord,  if  we  were 
heathens  or  deniers  of  Deity,  they  would 
not  hate  us ;  it  is  because  of  the  Religion 
Thou  gavest  us!”  And  it  has  been  thus 
ever  since. 


35 


But  the  Jew  has  nothing  to  be  asham¬ 
ed  of — whether  in  regard  to  his  Religion 
or  his  record  among  the  nations.  As  for 
his  religion,  it  is  well-known  that  it  has 
formed  the  fountain  of  the  spiritual  life 
of  mankind  and  the  ethical  foundation 
of  civilization.  And  as  for  his  record, 
the  Jew  need  not  fear  any  competent 
and  honest  inquiry,  nor  need  he  blush  at 
the  results.  Let  traducers  rage  and  ac¬ 
cuse  the  Jew  of  what  crimes  their  fancy 
might  breed;  none  the  less  it  remains 
true  that  in  every  country  the  Jew  has 
been  equal  to  the  best  in  every  task  of 
patriotism,  sacrifice,  and  service,  and 
such  he  has  been  because  of  the  dictates 
of  his  religious  convictions.  To  these 
convictions  Purim  bids  us  remain  true. 

And  it  bids  us  remain  true  to  them  in 
a  spirit  of  confidence.  It  bids  us  hope 
for  ultimate  triumph  and  vindication. 
Hope,  the  rabbis  have  said,  is  the  sole 
weapon  of  the  Jew,  and  it  is  hope,  never 
ending  hope,  that  fits  him  for  redemp¬ 
tion.  En  bey  ad  Y Israel  ela  ha-kiwuy.  Nay, 
it  is  the  distinctive  mark  of  the  Jew,  for, 
as  a  sixteenth  century  rabbi  puts  it,  even 

36 


in  time  of  trouble  he  keeps  on  trusting 
in  the  Divine  Mercy  with  all  his  heart. 

Oh,  I  know  it  is  hard  to  speak  of  a 
happy  future  when  the  present  is  so 
clouded.  It  is  hard  to  speak  comfort 
when  the  dead  lie  around  us. 

*‘For  all  can  feel  the  God  that  smites, 

But  oh,  how  few  the  God  that  loves.” 

Still  it  is  one  of  the  advantages  of  hav¬ 
ing  so  glorious  a  history  that  it  enables 
us  to  discern  the  gleam  of  a  triumphant 
sun  even  in  a  sky  heavy  with  clouds. 

The  one  lesson  of  Jewish  history  is 
confidence.  Time  and  again,  it  tells  us, 
the  Jew  has  had  to  face  foes  and  feuds 
— from  the  very  days  of  Egypt  and  Am- 
alek:  yet  he  has  survived;  the  others 
have  perished,  but  he  has  lived  on.  The 
Jew  is  indestructible.  Even  God,  as  the 
rabbis  put  it,  could  not  destroy  the  Jews 
(as  once  in  the  time  of  Moses  He  meant 
to  do).  This  is,  add  the  rabbis,  what 
made  Haman’s  enterprise  so  ludicrous. 
“You  remind  me,”  said  the  Lord  to  Ha- 
man,  “of  a  little  bird  that  got  angry  at 
the  ocean  for  washing  away  its  nest  and 

37 


decided  to  dry  it  up  with  bits  of  sand! 
You  cannot  destroy  Israel !  Even  I  could 
not  destroy  it!”  It  is  with  confidence 
that  we  must  look  to  the  future,  and  our 
history  justifies  such  confidence. 

And  to  courage  and  confidence,  Purim 
bids  us  add  another  quality — that  of 
conciliation. 


We  Jews  should  contribute  what  we 
can  toward  the  conciliation  and  reconcil¬ 
iation  of  the  world.  There  is  too  much 
misunderstanding  among  men  today — 
too  much  hate — too  much  panic  and 
fear!  There  is  too  much  of  the  spirit  of 
Amalek.  The  world  can  never  recover 
health  and  peace  as  long  as  this  condi¬ 
tion  lasts.  Everybody  will  suffer,  and 
the  Jew  along  with  the  rest!  As  long  as 
the  seed  of  Amalek — the  spirit  of  hate 
and  strife — exists  in  the  world,  said  an 
ancient  rabbi,  neither  the  Divine  Name, 
nor  the  Divine  Throne,  is  perfect.  Yad  al 
kes  Yah:  a  hostile  hand  rests  on  God’s 
throne;  Milhamah  YAdonay:  there  is  war 
upon  the  Lord.  God’s  Kingdom  cannot 
be  established. 


i 


38 


Men  must  begin  to  think  of  coming 
together — they  must  hang  together,  or 
they  will  hang  apart !  It  is  for  us  to  de¬ 
fend  ourselves  and  to  defend  our  faith; 
but  at  the  same  time  to  seek  to  bring 
people  together  in  a  spirit  of  humanity 
and  amity,  which  is  both  the  heart  of 
Judaism  and  the  only  hope  of  the  world. 

Oh  that  Purim  might  bring  us  the 
spirit  of  courage,  of  confidence,  and  of 
conciliation!  Then  shall  it  continue  to 
fill  our  lives  with  “light  and  gladness, 
joy  and  honor.” 


39 


.  . 


IV 


IS  JESUS  THE  LIGHT  OF  THE 

WORLD? 

(For  Christmas  Day) 

“Thus  saith  the  Lord,  thy  Redeemer, 
the  Holy  One  of  Israel:  I  am  the  Lord 
thy  God,  who  teacheth  thee  for  thy  profit, 
who  leadeth  thee  by  the  way  that  thou 
shouldest  go.” — Isaiah  48,  17-18. 

ON  the  day  which  the  world  round 
about  us  observes  as  the  birthday 
of  Jesus,  our  thoughts  naturally 
turn  to  that  important  theme.  On  such 
a  day  Jesus  is  praised  and  worshipped 
all  over  the  globe;  millions  of  men  make 
holiday  in  his  honor,  magnifying  his 
name,  and  proclaiming  him  as  the  Light 
of  the  World.  And  the  question  inevit¬ 
ably  arises  in  our  minds,  Has  Jesus  really 
been  the  light  of  the  world  for  these 
wellnigh  two  thousand  years,  and,  what 
is  more,  is  he  actually  today  the  light  of 
the  world? 

Some  people,  no  doubt,  will  say,  why 
should  we  Jews  ask  any  such  question, 
and  what  concern  is  it  of  ours?  But,  for 

41 


more  than  one  reason,  it  certainly  is  of 
great  import  to  us  Jews. 

First,  because  Jesus  himself  was  a 
Jew,  and  no  intelligent  Jew  can  be  indif¬ 
ferent  to  the  story  of  Jesus  and  his  part 
in  the  direction  and  development  of 
mankind.  Also,  as  Jews  we  are  vitally 
concerned  in  the  religious  and  ethical 
growth  of  the  world,  and  Jesus  has  come 
to  occupy  a  central  place  in  that  process. 
And  last,  but  not  least,  we  are  interest¬ 
ed  in  Jesus  because  those  calling  them¬ 
selves  his  followers  have  had  much  to  do 
with  shaping  the  fortunes  (one  might 
say  the  misfortunes)  of  the  Jewish 
people. 

If  on  such  a  day,  when  in  every  church 
the  praise  of  Jesus  is  sung  and  the  air 
is  full  of  chimes  telling  of  his  birth,  I 
pause  to  think  and  wonder  about  Jesus, 
it  is  not  something  artificial  or  academic. 
On  the  contrary,  it  is  the  most  natural 
thing  in  the  world. 

What  a  pity,  then,  that  upon  consider¬ 
ation  of  the  question,  we  cannot  honest¬ 
ly  affirm  that  Jesus  actually  has  become 

42 


the  light  of  the  world — not  in  any  such 
manner  as  would  have  transformed  the 
world  and  made  it  something  like  the 
sort  of  place  he  would  fain  have  seen  it 
become. 

Of  course,  the  student  of  history 
knows  that  in  every  period  since  the 
time  of  Jesus  there  have  been  certain 
men  and  women  who  were  greatly  in¬ 
fluenced  and  improved  and  enlightened 
by  his  teaching,  by  his  life,  by  his  ex¬ 
ample.  Some  of  those  men  and  women 
are  among  the  noblest  heroes  and  saints 
humanity  has  known.  One  need  but  read 
the  Confessions  of  St.  Augustine,  or  the 
writings  and  the  story  of  St.  Francis,  or 
the  works  and  the  life  of  Leo  Tolstoy,  to 
realize  what  an  ennobling  influence  Je¬ 
sus  has  exercised  upon  certain  choice 
spirits  in  different  periods  and  parts. 

But,  unfortunately,  such  men  and 
women  are  exceptional.  What  happened 
to  them  is  not  typical  of  what  has  hap¬ 
pened  to  the  world  at  large,  through  the 
impact  of  Jesus’s  teaching  and  exper¬ 
ience.  The  world  at  large — I  mean,  that 

43 


part  of  it  which  proclaimed  Jesus  as  the 
founder  of  its  faith  and  the  pattern  of 
its  conduct — has  manifested  no  such 
change,  no  such  transformation,  no  such 
thorough-going  improvement  of  practice 
and  ideals  as  we  have  every  reason, 
every  right,  to  believe  Jesus  sought  to 
bring  about. 

Nor  is  this  merely  the  contention  of 
such  as  do  not  regard  Jesus  as  the  foun¬ 
der  of  a  new  faith.  On  the  contrary, 
some  of  the  most  devout  followers  of 
Jesus  affirm  it.  The  more  they  love  Je¬ 
sus,  the  more  eager  and  outspoken  are 
they  in  pointing  out  the  disparity  be¬ 
tween  the  recorded  teachings  of  Jesus 
and  the  conduct  of  those  who  have  called 
him,  Lord,  Lord! 

For  example,  who  could  be  a  more  au¬ 
thentic  disciple  of  Jesus  than  Dean  Inge 
of  St.  Paul's?  Yet,  this  is  the  burden  of 
his  brilliant  argument  in  one  of  his 
“Outspoken  Essays,1 ”  which  recently 
have  attracted  so  much  attention.  The 
indictment  of  the  official  followers  of 
Jesus,  he  pleads,  is  no  reflection  on  the 
doctrine  or  the  purpose  of  Jesus;  it  is  an 

44 


indictment  of  those  who  have  called 
themselves  his  disciples  and  deputies. 

And  why?  Because  we  know  what 
Jesus  sought  to  teach.  We  know,  as 
Dean  Inge  points  out,  that  he  tried  to 
teach  anew  the  doctrine  of  the  Jewish 
Prophets,  that  everything  he  said  and 
did  was  in  the  spirit  of  those  Prophets. 
“There  is  no  evidence,”  Dean  Inge  main¬ 
tains,  “that  the  historical  Christ  ever  in¬ 
tended  to  found  a  new  institutional  Reli¬ 
gion.  He  neither  attempted  to  make  a 
schism  in  the  Jewish  church  nor  to  sub¬ 
stitute  a  new  Religion  for  it.  He  placed 
himself  deliberately  in  the  prophetic  line. 
The  whole  manner  of  his  life  and  teach¬ 
ing  was  prophetic.”  Similarly,  Mr.  H.  G. 
Wells,  in  his  Outline  of  History,  asserts 
that  “what  is  clearly  apparent  is  that 
the  teaching  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth  was  a 
prophetic  teaching  of  the  new  type  that 
began  with  the  Hebrew  Prophets.” 

And  who  does  not  know  what  the 
Jewish  Prophets  were,  what  they 
taught?  They  were  teachers  of  the 
Right,  champions  of  Justice  and  Mercy, 
paracletes  of  the  poor  and  the  oppressed 
— they  sought  to  rid  the  world  of  the 

45 


curse  of  lust  and  greed  and  cruelty,  and 
to  bring  about  a  reign  of  mercy  and 
good-will.  And  such  was  also  the  mis¬ 
sion  of  Jesus — such  his  perpetual  pre¬ 
cept  and  purpose.  He  was  the  friend  of 
the  poor.  He  was  the  lover  of  mankind. 
He  was  the  gentle  teacher  of  the  humble, 
just  as  he  was  the  stern  censor  of  the 
cruel  and  false — all  this,  because  the 
Ideals  of  the  Prophets  animated  him  and 
he  sought  to  forward  and  to  fulfil  their 
divine  doctrine. 

Yet  we  know  this  doctrine  was  not  ac¬ 
cepted  as  the  actual  light  of  the  world 
after  the  death  of  Jesus  any  more  than 
after  the  death  of  Isaiah.  And  by  none 
less  so  than  the  very  kingdoms  and  prin¬ 
cipalities  that  called  themselves  the  pro¬ 
fessors  of  the  Christian  faith  and  its 
protectors  in  the  world. 

Indeed,  what  could  be  more  unlike  the 
teaching  of  Jesus  than  the  history  of 
Europe  throughout  the  dark  ages  and 
the  middle  ages,  with  their  unceasing 
wars  and  factions  and  persecutions? 
“The  history  of  Europe  from  the  fifth 
century  onward  to  the  fifteenth,”  says 

46 


Mr.  Wells  in  his  History,  “is  very  largely 
the  history  of  the  failure  of  this  great 
idea  of  a  divine  world  government  to 
realize  itself  in  practice.” 

Nor  could  anything  be  less  in  tune 
with  the  gentle  doctrine  of  Jesus  than 
the  treatment  which  was  meted  out  to 
the  Jews  by  the  very  emperors  of  Rome 
who  first  adopted  Christianity  and  made 
it  the  official  religion  of  their  state.  The 
barbarous  legislation  of  Constantine  and 
Constance  and  Theodosius  and  Justinian 
— the  Christian  emperors  of  Rome  from 
the  fourth  to  the  sixth  century — not 
only  caused  measureless  misery  to  the 
Jews  of  those  remote  ages,  but  to  this 
very  day  its  evil  effects  have  continued. 
Modern  persecutions  of  the  Jews  are  but 
a  continuation,  a  consequence,  of  their 
cruel  policy,  and  present-day  slander  of 
the  Jew  an  echo  of  the  malice  which  first 
found  expression  under  those  imperial 
converts  to  Christianity. 

No  one  can  read  those  chapters  of  his¬ 
tory  and  still  believe  that  they  reflect  the 
least  ray  of  the  light  which  Jesus  sought 
to  bring  into  the  world. 

But  is  it  any  better  at  the  present  mo- 

47 


ment?  We  need  only  pick  up  our  daily 
newspaper  and  we  shall  admit  that,  un¬ 
fortunately,  things  today  are  not  better 
than  aforetime. 

Indeed,  is  it  possible  to  believe  that 
ever  they  were  worse?  It  is  true  that 
here  and  there  we  witness  things  for 
which  we  are  grateful  and  which  fill  us 
with  hope.  There  are  many  charitable 
men  and  women  in  the  world.  Here  and 
there  we  find  idealists  and  apostles  of 
peace  and  good-will.  The  League  of  Na¬ 
tions  has  just  met  for  the  first  time  at 
Geneva.  Yet,  on  the  other  hand,  there  is 
so  much  suffering  and  strife  in  the 
world,  so  much  enmity  and  selfishness, 
and  such  a  recrudescence  (even  in  our 
country)  of  racial  and  religious  bigotry 
and  hatred,  that  even  the  most  reckless 
of  optimists  could  hardly  maintain  that 
the  prophetic  teaching  of  old  Judea  fin¬ 
ally  had  become  the  light  of  the  world. 

But  what  does  it  prove?  Does  it  prove 
that  Jesus  was  wrong,  and  that  the  doc¬ 
trine  of  the  Jewish  Prophets  was 
wrong?  Not  if  we  take  the  state  of  the 
world  today  as  a  test.  The  world  is  un¬ 
happy  today.  It  is  full  of  fear  and  la- 

48 


mentation.  No  one  knows  what  the 
morrow  will  bring  forth.  The  old  civili¬ 
zation  has  led  to  no  satisfactory  results 
— to  no  haven  of  happiness  and  peace. 

Has  not  the  time  come  for  a  new  ex¬ 
periment?  Might  we  not  hark  back  to 
the  old  Jewish  Prophets  and  their  teach¬ 
ings?  Justice — they  said — mercy,  ser¬ 
vice:  these  are  the  conditions  of  human 
happiness  and  security.  Surely,  the  time 
has  come  for  mankind  to  try  this  method 
of  attaining  happiness,  for  the  world  to 
turn  in  good  earnest  to  the  so-long 
neglected 'light  of  this  teaching. 

“But  vain  the  sword  and  vain  the  bow, 

They  never  can  work  war’s  overthrow. 

The  hermit’s  prayer  and  the  widow’s  tear 
Alone  can  free  the  world  from  fear.” 

As  Jews  we  may  well  be  proud  of  the 
homage  the  world  pays  to  Jesus.  But  so 
much  the  more  is  it  our  duty  to  bear  in 
mind  the  eternal  moral  and  spiritual 
ideals  of  Israel  which  he  sought  to  voice 
and  to  vitalize.  Let  us  make  sure  that 
we  remain  true  to  those  ideals  and,  each 
in  his  own  sphere  and  according  to  his 
own  strength,  let  us  try  to  make  them 
the  beacon-light  of  the  world! 

49 


V 


THE  UNIVERSAL  IMPORTANCE  OF 

IBN  GEBIROL 

“Behold,  thou  shalt  call  a  nation  that 
thou  knowest  not,  and  a  nation  that  knew 
not  thee  shall  run  unto  thee.” 

— Isaiah  55,5. 

THIS  year  is  remarkable  for  the  ob¬ 
servance  of  the  anniversaries  of 
great  men.  Dante,  Keats,*  Luther, 
and  other  famous  men  are  being  com¬ 
memorated.  We  might  well  pause,  there¬ 
fore,  to  celebrate  the  memory  of  one  of 
the  foremost  poets  and  philosophers  the 
Jews  have  given  to  the  world — Solomon 
Ibn  Gebirol — who  was  born  nine  hun¬ 
dred  years  ago.  His  name  is  not  as  well 
known  as  those  of  the  other  worthies; 
nevertheless,  he  is  one  of  the  greatest  of 
them  all,  and  his  influence  extended  not 
only  throughout  the  house  of  Israel,  but 
far  beyond  into  the  Christian  and  Mo- 
hametan  world. 

There  is  at  present  a  revival  of  in¬ 
terest  in  the  Middle  Ages.  It  is  one  of 
the  most  remarkable  spiritual  and  intel¬ 
lectual  phenomena  of  the  age.  Not  so 

51 


very  long  ago  no  cultivated  or  advanced 
person  was  supposed  to  have  any  respect 
for  the  culture  of  the  Middle  Ages.  The 
word  medieval  was  a  byword,  suggest¬ 
ing  everything  that  was  benighted,  back¬ 
ward,  and  brutal.  And,  no  doubt,  the 
Middle  Ages  merited  some  of  the  oppro¬ 
brium  they  provoked.  None  the  less,  we 
seem  of  late  to  have  realized  that  after 
all  wisdom  was  not  born  with  the  new 
age,  nor  virtue,  and  that  the  Middle  Ages 
created  things  and  possessed  qualities 
which  still  deserve  admiration  and 
perhaps  emulation.  A  goodly  number 
of  writers  and  artists  are,  like  Mr. 
Henry  Adams  and  Mr.  Cram,  working 
toward  a  renewal  of  interest  in  the 
life  and  thought  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
and  one  cannot  help  wondering  wheth¬ 
er  the  next  fifty  years  may  not  wit¬ 
ness  a  considerable  return  to  medieval 
thought  and  ideals. 

At  such  a  time,  I  think,  it  behoves 
us  to  renew  acquaintance  with  such  a 
man  as  Ibn  Gebirol,  who  has  been- 
called  (I  believe  rightly)  the  greatest 
Jewish  religious  poet  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  who  is  regarded  by  experts  as 

-  i.  .  i 

52 


one  of  the  most  original  philosophers 
the  Jews  have  ever  produced,  and  who 
was,  moreover,  the  first  Arabic-Span- 
ish  philosopher  to  be  known  and 
studied  by  the  Christian  world. 

It  is  true  that  few  are  familiar  with 
his  name.  More’s  the  pity!  Even  when 
we  sing  his  songs — and  we  often  do 
in  our  temples,  as  the  popular  hymn 
“Early  will  I  seek  Thee,”  is  a  version 
of  one  of  his  poems — even  then,  I  say, 
we  do  not  think  of  him. 

But  this  has  happened  before.  It  is 
one  of  the  most  astonishing  facts  in 
the  entire  history  of  philosophy  that 
for  many  centuries  Ibn  Gebirol  was 
studied  and  quoted  by  the  most  emi¬ 
nent  scholars  of  Europe,  under  the 
name  of  Avicebron,  without  it  being 
known  that  Avicebron  was  a  corrup¬ 
tion  of  Ibn  Gebirol’s  Arabic  name. 
Only  about  the  middle  of  the  nine¬ 
teenth  century  Solomon  Munk,  the 
French  Jewish  scholar,  detected  the 
corruption  and  restored  the  author’s 
true  name. 

Yet,  Ibn  Gebirol  deserves  to  be 
known  better. 


53 


His  very  life  is  full  of  human  in¬ 
terest.  It  reads  very  much  like  the  life 
of  some  of  the  great  English  poets — 
like  that  of  John  Keats,  of  Chatterton, 
and  of  Francis  Thompson — who  suffered 
and  struggled  and  died  young,  yet  pro¬ 
duced  immortal  works. 

For,  Ibn  Gebirol,  who  was  bom  in  Ma¬ 
laga  and  lived  in  Saragossa,  was  left  an 
orphan  at  an  early  age,  and  poor  besides. 
He  depended  on  the  help  of  others. 
Nevertheless,  he  managed  to  get  a  fine 
education  in  both  sacred  and  secular 
subjects.  At  the  age  of  fifteen  or  sixteen, 
he  already  wrote  poems  which  showed 
poetic  passion,  as  well  as  other  admir¬ 
able  qualities.  He  was  conscious  of  his 
poetic  gift,  and  of  the  excellence  and 
compensations  of  poetry.  Throughout 
his  life  he  suffered  from  those  ills  and 
hardships  which  so  often  have  haunted 
poets.  Like  Dante,  he  experienced  the 
sorrow  of  inconstant  friends,  and  like 
Dante,  also,  he  was  forced  to  leave  his 
city  and  wander  about  from  place  to 
place.  From  a  poem  of  his,  recently  dis¬ 
covered  (and  published  by  Brody  in  the 

54 


Hebrew  magazine  Ha-Shiloah)  we  learn 
that  for  years  he  was  afflicted  with  a 
painful  malady,  perhaps  tuberculosis, 
which  probably  was  partly  responsible 
for  the  note  of  melancholy  in  his  poetry, 
and  caused  his  death.  There  is  a  pa¬ 
thetic  legend  connected  with  his  death, 
which  Heine  has  woven  into  a  beautiful 
poem.  And  he  was  scarcely  thirty  years 
old  when,  in  Valencia,  he  died. 

Yet  in  this  brief  span  of  time,  despite 
poverty  and  distress,  he  contrived  to 
produce  works  which  gave  him  influence 
and  immortality  not  only  among  his  own 
people,  but  also  in  the  world  at  large. 

Indeed,  in  one  respect  Ibn  Gebirol  be¬ 
came  better  known  among  non-Jews 
than  among  Jews,  namely,  as  a  philos¬ 
opher. 

In  recent  years,  Jewish  students  have 
paid  some  attention  to  his  philosophic 
work,  “The  Fount  of  Life.”  Professor 
Neumark,  in  the  Hebrew  version  of  his 
massive  History  of  Jewish  Philosophy, 
promises  a  new  appraisal  of  its  origi¬ 
nality  and  influence.  But  for  centuries 
it  was  ignored  by  Jewish  students; 

55 


it  was  seldom  mentioned  in  the  medie¬ 
val  literature  of  the  Jews.  On  the 
other  hand,  it  was  cited  and  discussed 
by  the  greatest  Christian  writers,  who 
knew  it  in  its  Latin  translation  from  tne 
Arabic  original.  Albertus  Magnus  and 
Thomas  Aquinas — the  foremost  Chris¬ 
tian  theologians  of  the  Middle  Ages — 
quoted  from  it,  and  so  did  Duns  Scotus 
and  Giordano  Bruno.  Some  agreed  with 
him  and  others  opposed  his  teaching; 
but  all  reckoned  with  him.  Indeed,  he 
was  so  often  discussed  in  Christian  liter¬ 
ature  that  some  took  him  for  a  Chris¬ 
tian,  just  as  others  took  him  for  an  Arab. 

Perhaps  Ibn  Gebirol  was  forgotten  by 
the  Jews,  as  a  philosopher,  because  early 
readers  of  his  work  criticized  his  doc¬ 
trine  as  unorthodox. 

He  was  suspected  of  pantheism.  All 
created  beings,  he  taught,  whether  spir¬ 
itual  or  corporeal,  are  composed  of  mat¬ 
ter  and  form.  The  various  species  of 
matter  are  but  varieties  of  universal 
matter,  and  all  forms  are  contained  in 
one  universal  form.  Even  the  intellect 
combines  form  and  matter,  though  they 
are  united  by  the  Divine  Will,  which  is 

56 


the  bond  between  the  primal  One  and 
the  intellect  and  which  alone  is  above 
the  distinction  of  matter  and  form.  Such 
was  the  fundamental  thesis  of  Ibn  Ge- 
birol’s  philosophy.  To  this  day  he  is  re¬ 
jected  as  a  pantheist  by  such  a  philos¬ 
opher  as  Hermann  Cohen. 

But  another  reason  for  his  neglect 
may  have  been  that  in  his  philosophic 
work  Ibn  Gebirol  makes  no  specific  ref¬ 
erence  to  Jewish  doctrine  and  tradition. 
He  writes  from  a  purely  logical  and  uni¬ 
versal  point  of  view.  He  addresses  him¬ 
self  to  universal  reason  rather  than  to 
Jewish  tradition.  In  a  word,  he  writes 
as  a  philosopher  and  not  as  a  Jew 
(though,  no  doubt,  feeling  all  the  time 
that  what  he  teaches,  just  because  uni¬ 
versal,  is  good  Jewish  teaching).  Per¬ 
haps,  this  was  why  his  book  made  no 
special  appeal  to  Jewish  readers.  But, 
as  a  modern  non- Jewish  philosopher  has 
pointed  out,  it  was  this  very  universal 
quality  of  Ibn  GebiroPs  work  that  gave 
it  such  importance — that  made  it  the  first 
link  between  the  thought  of  the  Arabic 
Orient  and  Western  Europe. 

57 


In  a  similar  universal  vein,  Ibn  Gebi- 
rol  wrote  his  ethical  work. 

All  Jewish  philosophers,  from  Philo 
down,  have  been  interested  in  ethics. 
Ethics  is  the  core  of  Jewish  thought.  It 
was  natural  for  Ibn  Gebirol  to  write  on 
ethics  as  well  as  on  philosophy.  The 
chief  end  of  man,  he  taught,  was  to  at¬ 
tain  union  with  the  Deity — the  source  of 
all  existence.  And  the  two  means  of  such 
union  are,  first,  knowledge,  and,  second, 
moral  conduct.  To  aid  men  in  the  attain¬ 
ment  of  knowledge,  he  wrote  his  philos¬ 
ophic  work;  to  help  them  to  right  con¬ 
duct,  he  composed  his  ethical  works — 
first,  “The  Choice  of  Pearls,”  a  compila¬ 
tion  of  ethical  maxims,  and  then,  “The 
Improvement  of  the  Qualities  of  the 
Soul,”  an  original  composition. 

And  in  this  latter  work,  again,  while 
he  quoted  the  Bible,  he  wrote  from  a 
universal  human  standpoint,  rather  than 
from  a  particular  Jewish  point  of  view. 
He  presented  ethics  as  a  subject  of  uni¬ 
versal  human  concern.  Man  was  his 
theme — man  the  greatest  work  of  God, 
the  equal  of  the  angels,  the  creation  of 
divinity,  endowed  with  a  soul  ever 

58 


yearning  for  Divine  union.  It  was  the 
duty  of  man,  taught  Ibn  Gebirol,  to  cul¬ 
tivate  the  divine  parts  of  his  soul,  and 
thus  help  it  grow,  just  as  the  farmer,  by 
plowing  and  watering  the  field,  helps  the 
seed  to  unfold.  Ibn  Gebirol  points  out 
the  qualities  which  are  helpful  to  the 
growth  of  the  soul,  and  in  seeking  to 
bring  home  his  doctrine,  he  quotes  freely 
from  non- Jewish  sources,  as  well  as 
from  the  Bible.  In  an  eleventh  century 
writer,  this  shows  a  remarkable  univer¬ 
sal  quality. 

But  we  must  not  think  that  for  all 
this  Ibn  Gebirol  was  the  less  devout  or 
loyal  a  Jew.  He  did  not  fancy,  as  some 
do  today,  that  there  is  an  inherent  con¬ 
flict  between  the  universal  and  the  Jew¬ 
ish  elements  of  thought,  and  that  for  the 
sake  of  a  universal  outlook  one  must 
forswear  Jewish  loyalty  as  something 
“sectarian.”  On  the  contrary,  a  more 
devoted  and  convinced  Jew  never  lived, 
and  this  is  proved  by  what  is  doubtless 
his  noblest  and  most  enduring  work — 
his  poetry.  I  have  already  said  that  he 
is  regarded  by  some  as  the  greatest  me- 

59 


dieval  Jewish  poet;  and  whoever  reads 
his  poetry  will  probably  agree. 

It  is  in  his  poetry,  after  all,  that  we 
see  the  man — his  soul.  His  other  writ¬ 
ings  are  objective,  scientific.  His  poetry 
is  lyrical;  in  it  his  soul  speaks.  And 
there — in  his  many  compositions — we 
have  evidence  over  and  over  again  of 
how  deeply  religious  he  was,  of  how  pas¬ 
sionate  was  his  faith,  his  love  for  God, 
his  love  for  Israel — of  how  tender,  con¬ 
stant,  sympathetic,  humble  a  soul  was 
his.  And,  indeed,  while  his  philosophic 
work  was  forgotten,  his  poetic  composi¬ 
tions,  like  that  marvelous  mystic  poem 
of  his,  The  Royal  Crown,  found  their 
way  to  the  heart  of  the  Jewish  people 
and  became  part  of  the  Jewish  prayer- 
book  in  all  parts  of  the  world. 

It  is  certain  that  when  his  poetry  is 
made  accessible  to  the  English-speaking 
world,  as  soon  it  will  be  in  a  masterly 
translation  by  Mr.  Israel  Zangwill,  he 
will  be  acknowledged  by  non- Jews  as 
well  as  Jews  as  one  of  the  finest  religi¬ 
ous  poets  the  world  has  known. 

60 


We  complain  sometimes  that  the  Jew 
is  not  appreciated  sufficiently.  But  this 
is  because  he  is  not  known.  Yet,  how 
can  we  expect  the  world  to  know  him,  if 
we  do  not  know  him  ourselves?  For  this 
reason,  if  for  no  other,  let  us  cherish 
the  memory  of  Ibn  Gebirol — the  man, 
the  thinker,  the  poet — and  let  us  emu¬ 
late  his  ideals  of  knowledge,  of  faith, 
and  of  life! 


■ 


VI 


THE  JEWISH  INTEREST  OF  DANTE* 

“Behold,  I  will  make  My  words  in  thy 
mouth  fire!” — Jeremiah  5,  14. 

THE  six  hundredth  anniversary  of 
Dante’s  death,  occurring  this  year, 
has  led  men  of  various  countries  to  af¬ 
firm  anew  Dante’s  title  to  perennial 
homage.  For  Dante  was  not  only  the 
chief  champion  and  master-poet  of  Italy 
but  one  of  the  sublimest  singers  and 
strongest  personalities  in  human  history. 
Carlyle  calls  him  “the  voice  of  ten  cen¬ 
turies”;  James  Russell  Lowell  regards 
him,  with  Homer,  Shakespeare,  Cervan¬ 
tes,  and  Goethe,  as  one  of  the  five  indis¬ 
pensable  poets,  and  to  Mr.  Santayana 
he  is  “the  type  of  a  consummate  poet.” 

Many  who  hitherto  knew  Dante  by 
name,  only — or  merely  as  the  author 
of  The  Divine  Comedy — are  now  aug¬ 
menting  their  knowledge  by  further 
study.  Thus  the  world  is  reviewing  once 

♦An  expanded  treatment  of  this  theme  is  found  in 
The  Menorah  Journal  for  October,  1921. 

63 


more  the  distinction  of  Dante — as  a 
poet,  and  also  as  a  personality  and 
prophet.  But  for  the  Jewish  reader 
there  is  special  interest  in  Dante,  which 
this  centenary  celebration  may  well 
serve  to  emphasize. 

At  first  blush,  one  might  think  that 
the  Jewish  interest  of  Dante  lies  solely 
in  the  friendship  which  is  said  to  have 
existed  between  him  and  Immanuel  of 
Rome. 

Immanuel  was  a  Jewish  poet — con¬ 
temporary  with  Dante — who  wrote  both 
in  Hebrew  and  in  Italian,  and  whose 
talent  and  wit  made  him  one  of  the  best 
known  medieval  Jewish  poets.  His 
Mehaberoth ,  or  Collections ,  is  treasured  by 
every  lover  of  Jewish  medieval  litera¬ 
ture.  Though  interspersed  with  jests 
and  clever  frivolities,  it  contains  religious 
poems  of  the  first  order,  as  well  as  some 
fine  love  poems,  ethical  aphorisms,  and 
many  a  sidelight  on  the  life  of  the  time. 
Its  final  chapter  contains  a  composition 
called  “Hell  and  Paradise,”  undoubtedly 
suggested  by  Dante’s  masterpiece.  Im¬ 
manuel  was  also  probably  the  author  of 

64 


“Yigdal,”  one  of  our  finest  liturgical 
poems,  still  sung  in  our  synagogues. 

Immanuel  and  Dante  are  said  to  have 
been  personal  friends,  having  met  either 
in  Rome,  at  gatherings  of  a  group  of 
political  idealists  known  as  “Young 
Italy,”  or  in  Verona,  at  the  court  of  Can 
Grande  della  Scala,  or  perhaps  in  Gub- 
bio,  at  the  house  of  their  common  friend, 
Bosone.  What  is  certain  is  that  Imman¬ 
uel  was  an  admirer  of  Dante,  that  he 
wrote  a  composition  suggested  by  Dan¬ 
te’s  work,  and  that  after  Dante’s  death, 
in  the  very  years  that  Immanuel’s  wife 
died,  he  exchanged  Italian  sonnets  with 
Bosone,  in  which  Bosone  condoled  with 
Immanuel  at  the  double  loss  of  wife  and 
friend  and  in  which  he,  in  turn,  uttered 
his  grief. 

Dante’s  interest  to  the  Jew,  however, 
lies  much  deeper  than  his  relation  to  Im¬ 
manuel.  It  touches  the  very  source  of 
those  spiritual  and  ethical  influences 
that  made  Dante’s  personality  and  fash¬ 
ioned  his  poetic  genius. 

No  one  familiar  with  the  prose  or 
poetry  of  Dante  would  claim  that  he  was 

65 


affected  solely  by  Jewish  thought.  He 
drew  inspiration  from  everywhere — from 
Roman  history,  from  the  Greek  classics, 
from  medieval  thought,  both  Christian 
and  Mohametan.  But  one  work  formed 
unmisakably  his  chief  source  of  inspir¬ 
ation — the  Bible.  We  find  traces  of  it 
on  wellnigh  every  page  of  The  Divine 
Comedy — traces  of  its  style,  its  imagery, 
its  teachings,  its  characters.  Indeed,  I 
doubt  whether  one  can  properly  under¬ 
stand  The  Divine  Comedy,  or  the  rest  of 
Dante’s  writings,  without  some  appreci¬ 
ation  of  his  numerous  Biblical  allusions 
and  citations.  Examples  face  us  wher¬ 
ever  we  turn — in  his  Letters,  in  the  Con- 
vivio,  in  The  Divine  Comedy. 

The  Divine  Comedy  is  a  religious  epic. 
It  tells  the  story  of  the  human  soul,  its 
fall  and  rise — its  fall  to  the  depths  of 
misery  and  suffering  through  the  pur¬ 
suit  of  evil,  and  its  rise  to  the  heights  of 
purity  and  gladness  by  the  aid  of  moral 
effort  and  faith.  In  this  sense,  The  Di¬ 
vine  Comedy  is  not  merely  a  medieval 
Catholic  poem;  it  is  universal. 

In  depicting  his  theme,  however,  Dante 
frequently  employs  Biblical  imagery.  We 

66 


find  it  in  the  very  opening  canto.  Three 
sins  are  the  cause  of  the  ethical  downfall 
of  man  and  lead  to  the  gates  of  hell: 
pleasure,  pride,  and  avarice.  They  lie  in 
wait  for  man,  turning  the  world  which 
the  Creator  has  filled  with  the  stars  of 
love  and  joy,  into  a  dark  and  dreadful 
forest.  For  Dante  this  fact  is  summed 
up  in  the  sixth  verse  of  the  fifth  chapter 
of  the  Prophet  Jeremiah.  “Wherefore,” 
it  runs,  “a  lion  out  of  the  forest  shall 
slay  them,  and  a  wolf  of  the  evening 
shall  spoil  them,  and  a  panther  shall 
watch  over  their  cities.”  In  the  three 
animals  the  poet  sees  the  symbols  of  the 
destructive  vices  of  man:  the  panther, 
symbol  of  pleasure;  the  wolf,  avarice; 
the  lion,  pride.  This  verse  of  Jeremiah 
explains  the  picture  in  the  dramatic 
opening  of  Dante’s  poem. 

Similarly,  purgatory  is  pictured  as  a 
mountain  which  man  must  scale  by 
means  of  penitence,  prayer,  and  toil,  if 
he  would  attain  the  divine  dwelling  place 
of  peace  and  joy.  Here  the  imagery  is 
based  on  the  fifteenth  Psalm.  “0  Lord, 
who  shall  dwell  in  Thy  tent,  who  shall 
rest  on  Thy  holy  mountain?”  The  ascent 

67 


is  difficult.  It  demands  exertion,  concen¬ 
tration,  courage.  But  it  grows  easier 
with  the  mounting,  and  on  the  summit 
there  is  security  and  rest.  It  is  the  moun¬ 
tain  that  healeth. 

As  for  the  vision  of  Paradise,  it  is 
shot  through  from  beginning  to  end  with 
beams  and  voices  from  the  Bible,  while 
its  imagery  shows  the  influence  of  Eze¬ 
kiel. 

In  his  letter  to  Can  Grande,  dedicat¬ 
ing  the  Paradise,  when  he  seeks  to  ex¬ 
plain  the  four  methods  of  interpreting 
The  Divine  Comedy,  as  well  as  any  other 
work  of  literature,  Dante  uses  by  way  of 
illustration  the  first  two  verses  of  Psalm 
114:  “When  Israel  went  out  of  Egypt, 
the  house  of  Jacob  from  a  people  of 
strange  language;  Judah  was  His  sanc¬ 
tuary,  and  Israel  His  dominion.”  This 
passage,  says  Dante,  may  be  taken  liter¬ 
ally  as  referring  to.  an  historic  event ;  or 
allegorically,  as  signifying  the  Christian 
teaching  of  redemption;  or  in  the  moral 
sense,  signifying  “the  conversion  of  the 
soul  from  the  sorrow  and  misery  of  sin 
to  a  state  of  grace” ;  or  anagogically,  sig¬ 
nifying  “the  passing  of  the  sanctified 

68 


soul  from  the  bondage  of  this  world  to 
the  liberty  of  everlasting  glory.” 

Even  more  significant  than  the  effect 
of  Biblical  diction  is  the  influence  of 
Jewish  thought  on  the  spiritual  and  ethi¬ 
cal  outlook  of  Dante.  The  fundamental 
ideas  of  Dante’s  religion  are  those  of  the 
Jewish  Prophets.  It  is  true  that  he  was 
a  devotee  of  the  Catholic  Church,  and 
that  he  subscribed  loyally  to  the  precepts 
of  its  theology.  But  certain  parts  he 
found  it  difficult  to  understand,  and  he 
utters  his  difficulties  repeatedly  in  his 
poem.  The  doctrine  of  Predestination, 
for  instance,  perplexed  him.  He  could 
not  understand  why  people  should  come 
into  the  world,  as  this  doctrine  had  it, 
with  their  eternal  destiny  fixed  in  ad¬ 
vance.  Similarly,  he  is  puzzled  by  the 
doctrine  that  only  those  are  saved  who 
believed  in  Christ,  and  that  without  such 
belief  even  the  best  of  men  cannot  enter 
Heaven.  Though  he  accepts  this  teach¬ 
ing,  and  incorporates  it  in  his  poem,  it 
disturbs  him. 

Against  the  religious  perplexities  of 
Dante,  however,  there  stand  out  certain 

69 


other  convictions  which  he  voices  with 
singular  beauty  and  passion:  his  belief 
in  God’s  unity,  in  the  Prime  Mover  of  all 
created  things;  his  belief  in  Man’s  godly 
origin  and  destiny  and  in  human  free¬ 
dom  of  choice;  his  belief  in  the  suprem¬ 
acy  of  righteousness,  in  the  para- 
mountcy  of  penitence.  These  are  the 
fundamentals  of  Dante’s  faith — of  his 
positive  ethical  and  religious  creed — and 
he  inherited  them  from  the  Jewish 
Prophets  whom  he  cherished  and  emu¬ 
lated.  It  was  from  the  Prophets,  too, 
that  he  obtained  his  Messianic  belief — 
his  belief  in  the  coming  of  a  better  time 
through  an  ideal  king — which  comforted 
him  in  exile  and  amid  the  evils  of  his 
time. 

Perhaps  it  was  Dante’s  conscious  in¬ 
debtedness  to  the  Jewish  spirit  that  was 
responsible  for  another  of  his  character¬ 
istics — his  kindly  attitude  to  the  Jews. 
Considering  the  differences  of  dogma, 
there  is  not  in  all  of  Dante’s  work  a  line 
which  can  give  offense  to  an  intelligent 
Jew. 

This  is  remarkable.  It  is  often  an- 
noying  in  otherwise  good  books  to  en- 

70 


counter  stupid  and  opprobrious  remarks 
about  the  Jews.  It  has  become  a  sort  of 
literary  tradition.  The  word  Jew  has 
become  a  byword,  a  “polarized”  word. 
We  find  it  so  used  in  Chaucer,  in  Shake¬ 
speare,  in  modern  writers.  We  rim 
across  it  several  times  in  Keats’s  Let¬ 
ters.  “They  that  dally  nicely  with 
words,”  says  Viola  in  Twelfth  Night,  “may 
quickly  make  them  wanton.” 

No  such  trespass  mars  Dante’s  great 
poem,  nor,  as  far  as  I  know,  any  other 
of .  his  works.  And  this  is  the  more 
remarkable  as  he  wrote  at  a  time  when 
persecution  of  the  Jews  was  at  its  worst, 
when  all  over  Europe  Jews  were  thrust 
about,  maligned,  and  murdered  as  never 
before.  Zunz,  in  his  classic  work  on  the 
Synagogual  Poetry  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
devotes  pages  to  the  enumeration  of  the 
horrible  experiences  of  the  Jews  in  the 
fourteenth  century,  which  even  Chris¬ 
tian  writers  have  called  the  hardest  thus 
far  known  by  the  Jews.  It  is  remarkable 
that  writing  at  such  a  time  Dante  did 
not  stumble  into  the  pitfalls  of  prejudice. 

Despite  the  idea  that  none  could  be 

71 


saved  who  believed  not  in  Christ,  Dan¬ 
te’s  Paradise  is  peopled  with  heroes  and 
heroines  of  Jewish  history,  some  of 
whom  he  crowns  with  admiration.  Dan¬ 
iel  “fed  on  pulse  and  wisdom  gained.” 
Joshua  and  the  Maccabee  were  so  mighty 
in  renown,  “as  every  muse  might 
grace  her  triumph  with  them.”  Morde- 
cai  he  calls  the  just,  the  righteous,  while 
Haman’s  face  bespeaks  malice  and 
rancor. 

Moses  he  places  in  the  highest  heaven, 
with  the  greatest  saints  of  his  own  faith. 
There,  closest  to  the  Divine  Presence, 
are  also  many  heroines  of  Israel,  to¬ 
gether  with  Dante’s  own  most  cherished 
ladies:  there  are  Sarah,  Rebecca,  Ruth, 
Judith,  and  Rachel.  Dante  links  Rachel 
with  Beatrice, — certainly  the  greatest 
homage !  ■ 

Nor  do  we  find  Jewish  names  in  Dan¬ 
te’s  catalogue  of  criminals.  Even  the 
usurers  of  his  poem  are  not  Jews:  they 
are  members  of  old  Christian  Italian 
families,  showing  that  then  as  now  one 
did  not  have  to  be  a  Jew,  nor  even  a 
friend  of  the  Jew,  in  order  to  be  shrewd 

at  the  game  of  money-making  or  money- 

72 


squeezing.  On  the  other  hand,  Dante 
refers  to  the  Jews  as  a  lesson  to  their 
Christian  fellow-citizens.  When  he  calls 
upon  the  latter  to  behave  like  men,  and 
not  beasts,  he  warns  them  against  the 
mockery  of  the  Jew  living  in  their 
streets. 

“When  by  evil  lust  enticed, 

Remember  ye  be  men,  not  senseless  beasts ; 

Nor  let  the  Jew,  who  dwelleth  in  your  streets, 

Hold  you  in  mockery.” 

Nothing  testifies  to  the  greatness  of 
Dante  more  than  this  just  treatment  of 
the  Jew,  at  a  time  when  all  others,  great 
and  small  were  arrayed  against  him. 

That  is  why  the  Dante  anniversary 
means  something  to  the  Jew,  in  addition 
to  what  it  means  to  others.  It  reminds 
us  of  Immanuel  and  his  connection  with 
Dante.  It  reminds  us  of  the  part  the 
Bible — Israel’s  masterpiece — had  in  the 
formation  and  expression  of  Dante’s  gen¬ 
ius.  It  reminds  us  of  the  influence  of 
Jewish  thought  and  idealism  upon  his 
own  prophetic  personality.  And  it  re¬ 
minds  us,  finally,  of  his  own  attitude  to 
the  people  to  whom  he  owed  much  and 
whom  he  could  not  but  revere. 

73 


\ 


May  it  inspire  us  to  a  closer  study  of 
his  kinship  to  Jewish  thought,  and  aug¬ 
ment  among  men  that  spirit  of  truth 
and  right  which  was  the  breath  of  his 
life,  and  that  love  of  high  and  noble 
things  which  was  the  source  and  the 
aim  of  his  work ! 

“Who  never  sold  the  truth  to  serve  the  hour, 

Nor  palter'd  with  Eternal  God  for  power; 

Who  let  the  turbid  streams  of  rumor  flow 
Thro'  either  babbling  world  of  high  and  low; 
Whose  life  was  work,  whose  language  rife 
With  rugged  maxims  hewn  from  life.” 


♦ 


74 


VII 


THE  PILGRIMS  AND  THE  JEWS 

“So  shall  they  fear  the  name  of  the 
Lord  from  the  west,  and  His  glory  from  * 
the  rising  of  the  sun.” — Isaiah  59,  19. 

THE  Thanksgiving  season  this  year 
(1920)  has  taken  on  special  impor¬ 
tance  from  the  celebration  of  the  ter¬ 
centenary  of  the  Pilgrims.  This  event 
is  being  observed  both  in  this  country 
and  in  England;  and  properly  so,  seeing 
that  the  voyage  of  the  Pilgrims  has  ex¬ 
ercised  a  pervasive  influence  on  the  life 
of  the  English-speaking  peoples,  and,  in¬ 
directly,  upon  all  humanity.  On  such  an 
occasion  it  is  appropriate  to  consider 
the  relation  of  the  Pilgrims  to  the  Jews 
— their  reciprocal  influence  and  indebted¬ 
ness. 

It  is  not  superfluous,  first  of  all,  to  re¬ 
call  that  the  Pilgrims  owed  to  the  Jews 
the  great  work  which  formed  their  chief 
inspiration  and  companion,  as  well  as  the 
basis  of  the  several  commonwealths  they 
established  on  this  continent.  One  can¬ 
not  think  of  the  Pilgrims  and  the  other 
Puritans  without  recalling  what  the 

75 


Bible  meant  to  them,  and,  namely,  the 
Jewish  Bible. 

Today  certain  Christian  scholars,  here 
and  abroad,  are  engaged  in  attacks  upon 
the  Jewish  Bible.  Frederic  Delitzsch  has 
run  amuck  in  his  effort  to  picture  it  as 
“the  great  delusion.”  And  others  share 
his  opinion.  Some  non- Jewish  writers, 
both  clerical  and  general,  have  fallen  into 
the  habit  of  assailing  the  God  of  the 
Old  Testament.  According  to  them,  the 
greatest  need  today  is  to  get  rid  of 
“Jehovah” — whom  they  represent  as  not 
good  enough  for  their  religious  and  ethi¬ 
cal  purposes.  “Jehovah”  may  have  suf¬ 
ficed  for  Jesus;  but  He  does  not  satisfy 
these  modern  critics.  “We  are  certainly 
better  than  Jehovah,”  asserts  the  hero  of 
Bojer’s  sad,  but  specious,  story,  “The 
Great  Hunger.” 

No  wonder  Professor  Hermann 
Strack,  the  veteran  theologian  and  stu¬ 
dent  of  rabbinic  literature,  is  incensed. 
“I  strongly  protest,”  he  says,  “and 
namely  as  a  Christian  theologian  against 
these  blasphemous  expressions  concern¬ 
ing  God,  the  God  of  Creation  and  of 
History,  whose  most  holy  Name  in  the 

76 


Old  Testament  is  JHVH,  opposed  as  such 
opinions  are  to  the  New  Testament  and 
to  the  whole  consciousness  of  original 
Christianity.  This  God  was  invariably 
acknowledged  by  Jesus  as  God,  the  God, 
and  also  as  his  own  God,  and  similarly 
by  the  Apostles.”  And  upon  this  God 
some  so-called  Christian  scholars  and 
scribes  of  today  do  not  hesitate  to  heap 
scandalous  epithets  of  scorn. 

At  such  a  time  it  is  well  to  remem¬ 
ber  what  the  Pilgrims  owed  to  the  Bible 
— what  it  meant  to  them — what  a  part 
it  played  in  their  great  enterprise.  It 
was  the  beginning  and  the  end  of  their 
life,  both  private  and  public.  In  religion, 
the  Bible  was  their  sole  authority.  In 
personal  conduct,  it  was  their  chief 
standard.  And,  politically,  it  formed  the 
groundwork  of  their  institutions  and 
laws.  “Their  Bible,”  says  Frederic  Har¬ 
rison  in  his  life  of  Oliver  Cromwell,  “was 
literally  food  to  their  understanding  and 
a  guide  to  their  conduct.  The  Bible  was 
almost  the  sole  poetry,  the  sole  morality, 
the  sole  religion.” 

Macaulay’s  description  of  the  Puri¬ 
tans,  in  his  History  of  England,  is  well- 

77 


known.  He  reminds  us  that  the  Puri¬ 
tans  paid  respect  to  the  Hebrew  lan¬ 
guage,  rather  than  to  the  Greek  of  the 
Gospels.  They  baptized  their  children 
by  names  of  Hebrew  patriarchs  and 
warriors.  They  sought  for  principles  of 
jurisprudence  in  the  Mosaic  law,  and  for 
precedents  to  guide  their  ordinary  con¬ 
duct  in  the  books  of  Judges  and  Kings. 
But  to  Macaulay,  Puritanism  repre¬ 
sented  cant  and  crudeness.  Carlyle, 
however,  sees  in  it  one  of  the  noblest 
human  heroisms.  “Here  were  heroes  on 
the  earth  once  more,”  he  says,  “who 
knew  in  every  fibre,  and  with  heroic 
daring  laid  to  heart,  that  an  Almighty 
Justice  does  verily  rule  this  world;  that 
it  is  good  to  fight  on  God’s  side  and  bad 
to  fight  on  the  devil’s  side.  The  essence 
of  all  heroisms  and  veracities  that  have 
been,  or  that  will  be!” 

The  Pilgrims,  however,  owed  to  the 
Jews  more  than  the  Bible.  They  took 
from  the  Jews  the  very  ideal  which  in¬ 
spired  their  heroic  course. 

The  Pilgrims  originally  were  known 
as  Separatists.  This  name  they  got  be¬ 
cause  in  England  they  separated  from 

78 


their  neighbors  on  account  of  their  par¬ 
ticular  religious  beliefs,  ethical  convic¬ 
tions,  and  political  purpose. 

The  world,  as  a  rule,  does  not  love  the 
separatist.  He  is  supposed  to  be  selfish, 
snobbish,  unsociable,  and  unlikable.  But 
are  there  not  two  kinds  of  separatists? 
There  is  the  separatist  who  isolates  him¬ 
self  from  his  fellowmen,  because  he  is 
self-centred  and  indifferent  to  the  gen¬ 
eral  weal.  And  there  is  the  other  kind 
of  separatist  who  keeps  apart  in  order 
to  preserve  his  ideals  and  beliefs,  and 
thus  so  much  the  better  to  serve  his  fel¬ 
lowmen.  Such  a  separatist  was  Abra¬ 
ham.  The  Maccabees  were  such  sepa¬ 
ratists.  Dante  and  Lincoln  were  such 
separatists.  The  Pharisees  were  such 
separatists — indeed,  this  is  what  their 
name  meant  originally,  though  it  became 
a  byword  with  certain  people,  like  that 
of  the  Puritans.  Many  of  the  foremost 
benefactors  of  mankind  (perhaps  all) 
were  such  separatists. 

As  a  people,  the  Jews  are  the  greatest 
instance  of  benignant  separatism  in  his¬ 
tory.  “A  people  which  dwells  alone,” 
the  heathen  prophet  calls  them  in  the 

79 


Bible ;  and  truly  so.  The  Jews  have  had 
to  pay  dearly  for  their  apartness;  all 
manner  of  abuse  and  suspicion  has  been 
heaped  upon  them  because  of  their  iso¬ 
lation.  Yet,  the  unbiased  student  knows 
that  only  thus  the  Jews  have  kept  intact 
their  spiritual  ideals  and  preserved  their 
religious  heritage,  and  that  only  thus 
they  were  enabled  to  become  a  blessing 
to  the  world. 

Christian  scholars,  though  still  few 
and  far-between,  are  beginning  to  pro¬ 
claim  this  truth,  which  by  and  by  all 
candid  people  will  accept.  One  need  but 
read  Mr.  Travers  Herford’s  book  on 
Pharisaism  or  his  Lecture  on  “What  the 
World  Owes  to  the  Pharisees.”  Looking 
at  the  matter  in  relation  to  the  world 
at  large,  and  not  merely  from  the  point 
of  view  of  its  bearing  on  Christianity — 
says  Mr.  Herford — can  it  be  doubted 
that  it  has  been  and  is  a  substantial 
benefit  to  the  human  race  that  there 
should  be  amongst  its  members  this  non- 
comformist  people  “to  represent  liberty 
of  thought,  freedom  of  conscience,  inde¬ 
pendence  of  judgment,  the  right  of  the 
human  mind  to  settle  for  itself  its  rela- 

80 


tion  with  God?”  “They  who  were 
branded  by  the  Roman  writer  as  enemies 
of  the  human  race,”  Mr.  Herford  adds, 
“have  wrought  for  it  through  the  cen¬ 
turies  a  priceless  benefit.” 

And  it  is  from  the  Jews  that  the  Puri¬ 
tans,  and  particularly  the  Pilgrims,  fight¬ 
ing  for  religious  freedom  and  ethical 
purity,  learned  to  become  Separatists 
for  the  sake  of  their  faith  and  their  pur¬ 
pose,  and  to  endure  the  hardships  such 
a  course  involved. 

If,  however,  the  Pilgrims  owed  a  great 
deal  to  the  Jews,  the  Jews  owe  no  less 
to  the  Pilgrims. 

It  is  not  extravagant  to  affirm  that 
nothing  has  been  so  largely  responsible 
for  the  modern  development  and  prog¬ 
ress  of  the  Jew  as  the  influence  of 
America.  America  has  given  full  free¬ 
dom  to  the  Jew  and  a  field  for  toil  and 
growth  unequalled  in  any  modern  coun¬ 
try  and  unsurpassed  by  any  period  of 
his  long  history.  Whatever  freedom  and 
opportunity  have  come  to  the  modern 
Jew  in  other  parts  of  the  world — except 
Holland,  which  even  in  the  seventeenth 
century  sheltered  the  Jew  as  well  as  the 

81 


Pilgrim — has  been  due  to  the  example 
of  America. 

But  America  owes  its  paramount 
ideals  and  institutions  to  the  Pilgrims. 
What  they  sought  and  wrought  was  not 
only  for  themselves,  but  for  posterity. 
And,  whatever  their  errors  and  faults, 
it  was  out  of  their  struggle  that  finally 
freedom  was  born,  just  as  by  their  labors 
the  permanent  foundations  of  this  coun¬ 
try  were  shaped. 

“Those  stern,  sad  men  in  peaked  hats,” 
says  George  William  Curtis,  “who 
prayed  in  camp  and  despised  love-locks, 
and  at  whom  fribbles  in  politics  laugh 
and  sneer  today,  were  the  indomitable 
vanguard  of  moral  and  political  free¬ 
dom,  If  they  snuffled  in  prayer,  they 
smote  in  fight;  if  they  sang  through 
their  noses,  the  hymn  they  chanted  was 
liberty:  if  they  aimed  at  divine  mon¬ 
archy,  they  have  founded  the  freest,  the 
most  enlightened,  the  most  prosperous, 
the  most  powerful  republic  in  history.” 

Therefore,  when  the  Jew  gives  thanks 
for  America,  he  must  give  thanks  for  the 
Pilgrims;  and  when  he  speaks  of  the 
debt  the  Pilgrims  owed  to  him,  he  must 

82 


never  forget  the  debt  he  owes  to  the 
Pilgrims. 

And  how  can  we  pay  this  debt?  There 
is  only  one  way.  It  is  by  remaining  true 
to  the  high  ideal  of  the  Pilgrims — -the 
ideal  for  the  sake  of  which  they  were 
willing  to  labor,  to  suffer,  to  go  into 
exile,  to  endure  hardships — the  ideal  of 
religious  loyalty  and  ethical  conduct 
which  they  expressed  in  their  Covenant 
and  sought  to  embody  in  their  common¬ 
wealth.  Godliness  as  the  foundation  of 
life,  concord  among  citizens,  obedience 
to  the  laws,  and,  finally,  a  life  of  work 
and  usefulness  for  the  common  good  on 
the  part  of  the  individual — this  was  the 
program  to  which  the  Pilgrims  pledged 
themselves  in  the  compact  they  signed 
in  the  cabin  of  the  Mayflower.  And 
though  many  changes  have  taken  place 
since  their  day,  we  need  their  ideal  still 
for  the  progress  and  prosperity  of 
America. 

Let  others  sneer  at  the  Puritans  as 
narrow  and  fanatical.  Let  us  think  only 
of  the  high  purpose  that  animated  them, 
and  endeavor  to  carry  on  their  work ! 

83 


VIII 


NAPOLEON, 

OR  THE  PLACE  OF 
THE  JEW  IN  THE  MODERN  WORLD 

“And  the  nations  shall  see  thy  right¬ 
eousness  and  all  kings  thy  glory.” 

— Isaiah  62,  2. 

AMONG  recent  anniversary  celebra¬ 
tions  none  has  attracted  more  at¬ 
tention  than  that  of  Napoleon,  who 
died  a  hundred  years  ago.  We  have  read 
new  comments  on  every  phase  of  his 
character  and  activity,  and  diverse  writ¬ 
ers  have  tried  again  to  appraise  his  place 
in  the  modern  world.  It  is  a  fact,  how¬ 
ever,  that  hardly  an  outstanding  figure 
in  the  history  of  Europe  but  has  had 
some  relation  with  the  Jew.  This  is  par¬ 
ticularly  true  of  Naploeon.  It  would, 
therefore,  seem  appropriate  that  we  re¬ 
fresh  our  memory  concerning  the  rela¬ 
tion  of  Napoleon  to  the  Jewish  people, 
and  the  effect  of  that  relation  upon  the 
subsequent  development  of  Jewish  life. 

Historians  have  differed  widely  in 
their  estimates  of  Napoleon.  To  some  he 

85 


has  been  a  veritable  god,  to  others  the 
devil  incarnate.  Mr.  Wells,  for  example, 
in  his  Outline  of  History,  treats  him  as 
wellnigh  the  worst  man  and  most  per¬ 
nicious  influence  that  Europe  has  known. 
Nor  is  the  English  writer  the  only  one 
to  paint  Napoleon  in  such  colors.  A  simi¬ 
lar  picture  we  find  in  Taine’s  account  of 
the  Origins  of  Contemporary  France,  in 
which  Napoleon,  with  all  tribute  to  his 
intellectual  powers,  is  described  as  the 
supreme  type  of  unsocial  egoism  and 
despotism. 

No  wonder,  there  is  a  diversity  of 
opinion,  also,  in  regard  to  Napoleon’s 
connection  with  the  Jews.  Some  depict 
him  as  a  friend,  and  others  as  a  foe  of 
the  Jews.  Our  task,  however,  is  not  to 
speculate  on  Napoleon’s  general  attitude 
— whether  he  was  a  lover  or  hater  of  the 
Jew,  any  more  than  to  analyze  the  vari¬ 
ous  Jewish  anecdotes  he  has  inspired. 
Legends  are  but  blossoms  on  the  tree 
of  every  great  man’s  life.  They  spring 
from  the  stem  of  history.  What  seed 
of  veracity  indwells  the  legends  concern¬ 
ing  Napoleon  and  the  Jews,  is  a  matter 
of  small  moment.  Similarly,  what  is  the 

86 


good  of  speculating  on  Napoleon’s  gen¬ 
eral  attitude  to  the  Jews?  Such  specula¬ 
tion  is  futile,  after  all. 

The  chances  are  that  Napoleon  neither 
loved  nor  hated  the  Jews,  any  more  than 
he  loved  or  hated  anybody  else.  All 
writers  seem  to  agree  that  he  was  a  man 
who  gave  little  play  to  the  emotions:  he 
was  a  man  of  projects,  not  of  sentiments. 
Human  beings,  whether  individuals  or 
nations,  to  him  were  facts,  with  which 
he  dealt  only  as  they  affected  his  plans. 
This  is  the  testimony  of  Madame  de 
Stael,  who  wrote  from  personal  knowl¬ 
edge.  “I  always  felt  somehow,”  she 
says,  “that  he  was  a  man  upon  whom  the 
emotions  of  the  heart  had  no  effect.  He 
hated  no  more  than  he  loved.  A  human 
being  to  him  was  not  his  own  kind,  but 
a  thing  or  a  fact.  II  n’y  a  que  lui  pour  lui. 
Nobody  counted  with  him  but  himself; 
all  other  creatures  were  ciphers.  Every¬ 
thing  was  either  a  means  or  an  end  with 
him.”  In  a  word,  he  treated  human 
beings  as  mere  facts  to  be  used  in  the 
pursuit  of  his  plans. 

As  for  the  Jews,  the  fact  was  that 
there  was  a  considerable  number  of 

87 


them  in  France  at  the  time  that  Napo¬ 
leon  was  busy  building  up  his  empire. 
The  further  fact  was  that  these  Jews 
had  been  emancipated  in  1791,  and  that 
nevertheless  considerable  friction  still 
existed  between  them  and  their  Christ¬ 
ian  neighbors,  particularly  in  Alsace  and 
Lorraine. 

Napoleon  by  nature  was  against  such 
disturbances.  If  he  stood  for  anything, 
it  was  order,  unity,  and  peace  wherever 
he  ruled.  He,  therefore,  wanted  to 
know  whether  the  causes  of  that  friction 
might  not  be  eliminated.  Also,  he  want¬ 
ed  to  know  what  the  real  attitude  of  the 
Jews,  now  that  they  were  free,  was 
toward  France  and  their  Christian 
neighbors.  And  it  was  by  his  effort  to 
get  an  answer  to  these  questions,  that 
he  brought  about  a  clear  definition  of 
the  place  of  the  Jew  in  the  modern 
world. 

Every  student  of  history  knows  how 
this  happened.  In  the  year  1806,  in  the 
month  of  May,  Napoleon  convoked  at 
Paris  an  Assembly  of  Jewish  Notables. 

What  was  the  immediate  cause?  It 
was  the  conflict  between  Christians  and 

88 


Jews  in  Alsace  and  Lorraine.  The  Chris¬ 
tians  complained  of  Jews  practicing 
usury.  This  led  to  disturbances  and  in¬ 
criminations.  Napoleon  wanted  to  get  to 
the  bottom  of  the  trouble.  There  was  no 
denying  that  usury  was  practiced  by 
some  Jews;  nor  that  the  moral  condition 
of  some  Jews  was  not  of  the  highest  na¬ 
ture. 

Napoleon  issued  a  decree  against  us¬ 
urers.  But  it  redounds  to  his  credit  that 
he  did  not  jump  to  the  conclusion  that  all 
Jews  were  usurers  and  all  were  de¬ 
graded,  and  that  he  realized  that  such 
faults  as  existed  among  them  were  due 
to  unfavorable  conditions  which  called 
for  amelioration.  He  did  not  intend  to 
allow  such  conditions  to  continue  in  his 
domain,  he  declared. 

This  is  why  he  convoked  the  Assembly 
of  Jewish  Notables,  and  put  before  them 
certain  questions  designed  to  throw  light 
upon  the  character  and  the  position  of 
the  modern  Jew. 

The  chief  questions  bore  on  these  sub¬ 
jects:  first,  the  attitude  of  Jews  to  the 
laws  of  marriage  and  divorce;  second, 

89 


their  attitude  to  France;  and,  third, 
their  attitude  to  non- Jews  in  regard  to 
usury.  Napoleon  wanted  answers  to 
these  questions  in  order  to  determine 
whether  the  Jews  were,  or  could  be 
made,  an  integral  part  of  the  country 
which  had  given  them  the  rights  of  cit¬ 
izenship,  or  whether  they  were  governed 
by  laws  at  variance  with  those  of  the 
rest  of  the  population.  Incidentally, 
these  questions  illustrated  the  chief  con¬ 
cerns  of  Napoleon’s  domestic  policy — the 
unity  of  France,  the  family  as  basis  of 
French  life,  and  a  system  of  clear  and 
coherent  laws. 

Upon  the  outcome  of  this  inquiry  a 
great  deal  more  depended  than  Napo¬ 
leon’s  personal  view  of  the  Jews.  The 
whole  position  of  the  Jew  in  the  modern 
world  depended  on  it.  Were  the  Jews,  in 
countries  which  emancipated  them,  to 
be  regarded  as  citizens,  as  complete 
members  of  the  community,  or  were 
they  fo  be  treated  as  sojourners,  as 
aliens  with  laws  of  their  own?  Was 
their  integration  in  the  life  of  the  coun¬ 
try,  if  not  perfect,  possible?  Citizens  or 
sojourners — this  was  the  question,  and 

90 


it  was  put  by  a  man  who,  whatever  his 
faults  (and  they  were  many),  had  as 
clear  and  comprehensive  an  intellect  as 
humanity  has  known. 

Fortunately,  the  Asembly  of  Notables 
gave  clear  answers. 

In  all  questions  of  civil  life,  they  af¬ 
firmed,  the  law  of  the  country  was  su¬ 
preme.  They  pointed  out  that  the  Bible 
contains  two  kinds  of  laws:  on  the  one 
hand,  civil  laws,  and,  on  the  other,  laws 
of  a  purely  religious  and  ethical  charac¬ 
ter.  The  civil  laws  of  the  Bible,  they 
maintained,  applied  to  ancient  Palestine, 
not  to  modern  life,  while  the  religious 
and  ethical  laws  of  the  Bible  are  binding 
everlastingly.  As  for  usury,  they  in¬ 
sisted,  the  Jewish  law  makes  no  distinc¬ 
tion  between  Jew  and  non-Jew;  it  for¬ 
bids  it .  unconditionally.  And  as  for 
loyalty  to  country,  there  was  not  the 
least  doubt  but  that  it  was  part  of  the 
Jew’s  religion,  that  he  was  in  duty 
bound  to  love  and  defend  his  country 
even  unto  death. 

In  a  word,  the  Assemly  of  Jewish  Not¬ 
ables  took  the  position  that  the  Jews 

91 


of  France  were  a  religious  community, 
and  that  by  their  very  religion  they 
were  bound  to  love  and  defend  their 
country  and  to  obey  its  laws. 

It  was  to  give  religious  sanction  to 
these  declarations  of  the  Notables  that 
Napoleon  later  on  created  the  Paris  San¬ 
hedrin,  which,  he  thought,  might  become 
a  centre  of  authority  for  the  Jews  of  the 
world. 

That  in  this,  as  in  other  things,  Na¬ 
poleon  was  carried  away  by  megalo¬ 
mania  is  probably  true.  It  is  certainly 
true  that,  within  two  years  after  the 
Assembly,  he  allowed  restrictive  meas¬ 
ures  to  be  enacted  against  the  Jews. 
Nevertheless,  the  fact  remains  that  the 
work  of  Napoleon’s  Assembly  and  San¬ 
hedrin  served  to  define  and  expound  the 
views  of  the  modern  Jew  on  certain 
questions  of  great  import  and  also  to  lay 
the  foundation  for  the  position  of  the 
Jew  in  the  modern  world.  It  was 
through  Napoleon’s  interest  and  initia¬ 
tive  that  the  world  was  informed  how 
the  Jew  stood  on  these  fundamental  sub¬ 
jects,  involving  the  merits  and  integrity 

92 


of  his  citizenship.  And  throughout  the 
nineteenth  century  this  remained  the 
position  of  the  Jew  in  all  civilized  coun¬ 
tries. 

The  significant  thing  is  that  today 
these  questions  have  again  become  all- 
important.  For  within  the  last  few  years 
the  old  question  has  been  re-opened.  Are 
the  Jews  citizens  or  sojourners?  Are 
they  here  for  good?  Or  are  they  here 
only  temporarily,  and  is  their  real  coun¬ 
try,  their  “homeland,”  elsewhere?  And 
from  these  questions  the  other  question 
has  sprung:  In  their  relationship  with 
non-Jews,  are  the  Jews  governed  by 
special  laws?  Such  queries  have  arisen 
anew,  and  an  answer  is  demanded  this 
time  not  •  by  an  emperor,  but  by  the 
world.  And,  alas!  the  answers  vary. 
But  many  of  us  feel  that  we  can,  and 
must,  repeat  categorically  the  answers 
given  by  Napoleon’s  Assembly,  and  that 
such  answers  alone  spell  safety  and  hap¬ 
piness  for  the  Jew. 

None  can  tell  what  the  twentieth  cen¬ 
tury  will  bring  forth.  But  as  we  look 
back  at  the  century  that  has  elapsed 

93 


since  the  death  of  Napoleon,  we  must 
reach  one  conclusion.  Take  it  all  in  all, 
it  was  one  of  the  noblest  periods  in  Jew¬ 
ish  history. 

.  In  some  quarters,  aspersions  have 
been  cast  in  recent  years  upon  the  Jew’s 
record  in  the  nineteenth  century.  Myopic 
carpers  have  called  it  a  period  of  deter¬ 
ioration,  of  surrender,  of  spiritual  slav¬ 
ery;  and  what  not.  But  the  actual  rec¬ 
ord  tells  a  different  story. 

The  nineteenth  century  will  stand  out 
as  one  of  the  most  fertile  and  glorious 
periods  of  Jewish  history.  It  was  a 
period  of  critical  transition  and  of  ad¬ 
justment.  The  political  and  civil  eman¬ 
cipation  created  momentous  problems 
and  tasks.  Not  since  the  ages  of  Ezekiel 
and  of  Ben  Zakkai  were  the  Jews  re¬ 
quired  to  effect  so  radical  a  revaluation 
of  their  creed.  And  what  has  happened? 
The  Jewish  people  have  risen  morally; 
they  have  carried  on  an  active  intellec¬ 
tual  and  spiritual  life,  and  they  have 
shown  themselves  eager  and  able  to  em¬ 
brace  every  kind  of  occupation  thrown 
open  to  them.  No  longer  can  even  their 
worst  enemy  speak  of  them  as  a  people 

94 


of  usurers  (though  the  phrase  was  a 
slander  always).  In  almost  every  trade, 
every  sphere  of  toil,  they  are  found  in 
large  numbers,  as  well  as  in  intellectual 
vocations.  This  the  nineteenth  century 
has  done — one  of  the  fairest  and  most 
fruitful  eras  in  Jewish  history. 

We  of  today  might  well  follow  its 
example.  Let  us  aim  to  remain  loyal  to 
our  faith,  let  us  seek  to  discharge  our 
full  duty  as  citizens,  and  let  us,  in  our 
contact  with  the  world,  prove  the  lofti¬ 
ness  and  impartiality  of  our  moral  laws. 
Thus  we  shall  help  to  safeguard  and  im¬ 
prove  the  place  of  the  Jew  in  the  modern 
world. 


95 


IX 


ADOLF  JELLINEK, 

OR 

THE  IDEAL  OF  A  MODERN  RABBI 


“There  shall  be  no  more  any  vain  vision 
nor  flattering  divination  within  the  house 
of  Israel.” — Ezekiel  12,  24. 


OF  late  we  have  witnessed  the  ob¬ 
servance  of  several  important  cen¬ 
tenaries.  Such  names  as  Keats, 
Marvel,  Dostoievski,  Dante,  Luther,  Na¬ 
poleon,  have  been  revived  anent  some 
anniversary  occurring  this  year.  It  is 
certainly  proper  that  we  pause  to  cele¬ 
brate  the  name  of  a  Jewish  worthy,  who 
was  born  a  hundred  years  ago  and  who 
not  only  was  one  of  the  illustrious  men 
of  his  time,  but  still  lives  as  a  spiritual 
influence  wherever  his  name  is  known  or 
his  books  are  read.  I  refer  to  Adolf  Jel- 
linek,  the  great  rabbi  and  preacher,  the 
centenary  of  whose  birth  occurs  this 
year,  and  of  whom  one  cannot  think 
without  advantage. 


The  chief  advantage  derived  from  a 
study  of  Jellinek’s  life  and  work  is  a 

97 


better  understanding,  a  clearer  grasp,  of 
the  noblest  ideal  of  a  modern  rabbi.  In 
this  regard,  Jellinek  is  especially  instruc¬ 
tive,  and  in  this  side  of  him  we  of  today 
might  have  a  particular  interest. 

Jellinek’s  personal  life,  also,  is  not 
lacking  in  appeal.  Born  in  a  small  town 
in  Moravia,  he  received  his  early  educa¬ 
tion  in  some  Jewish  schools,  under  the 
guidance  of  his  grandmother,  who  was 
the  daughter  of  a  famous  rabbi,  his 
mother  having  died  young.  Later  he 
studied  at  the  universities  of  Prague  and 
Leipsic,  where  he  received  a  manifold 
equipment  for  his  future  work.  It  was 
at  Leipsic  that  he  held  his  first  rabbinic 
position  and  became  famous  as  a  preach¬ 
er,  going  from  there  to  Vienna,  where 
he  died  in  1893,  after  having  gained  a 
worldwide  reputation  among  both  Jews 
and  non- Jews  as  one  of  the  most  elo¬ 
quent  preachers  of  his  age. 

The  biography  of  such  a  man  is  itself 
not  without  interest.  But  what  concerns 
us  most  is  the  ideal  that  inspired  Jelli¬ 
nek,  that  lay  behind  all  his  work,  that 
guided  and  goaded  him  in  his  diverse 
rabbinical  activities.  For,  an  apprecia- 

98 


tion  of  Jellinek’s  ideal  might  well  help  us 
to  answer  a  question  which  is  often 
asked  today,  namely,  What  should  be  the 
ideal  of  a  modern  rabbi?  And  it  might 
help  congregations  to  determine  what 
kind  of  rabbi  they  ought  to  have. 

No  reader  of  Jellinek’s  writings  can 
doubt  for  a  moment  as  to  what  came 
first  in  his  ideal.  It  was  the  eager  desire 
to  give  new  expression  to  the  truths,  the 
beauties,  the  purpose  of  Judaism. 

Wherever  we  turn  in  his  works,  we 
find  this  object  uppermost.  Jellinek  felt 
that  Judaism  contained  truths  of  ever¬ 
lasting  value,  that  its  institutions  and 
the  life  of  its  adherents  were  meant  to 
be  beautiful,  that  its  teachings  were  de¬ 
signed  to  produce  the  noblest  ethical  and 
spiritual  results.  But  he  knew,  also, 
that  in  order  that  this  end  might  be 
won,  Judaism  in  the  new  age  required 
an  expression  appropriate  to  the  times 
and  different  from  that  of  the  ages 
which  had  preceded  and  during  which 
conditions  of  Jewish  life  were  entirely 
different. 

To  this  theme  Jellinek  returns  re¬ 
peatedly.  And  he  returns  to  it  because  it 


is  vital.  The  people  of  his  age  had 
emerged  from  the  ghetto.  They  loved 
beauty.  They  sought  culture.  They 
needed  ethical  and  spiritual  sustenance. 
Could  they  find  these  things  in  the  old 
religion,  which  many  of  them  associated, 
though  wrongly,  with  ugliness,  narrow¬ 
ness,  and  rigid  legalism?  Jellinek  con¬ 
sidered  it  as  his  first  duty  to  demon¬ 
strate  that  Judaism  did  contain  these 
things,  and  that  to  find  them  it  was  nec¬ 
essary  only  to  go  down  to  the  heart  of 
Judaism,  where  its  treasures  were 
hidden. 

And  this  brings  us  to  the  other  part 
of  Jellinek’s  ideal — his  love  of  Jewish 
learning  and  his  desire  to  diffuse  this 
learning  among  men. 

Learning  has  always  formed  part  of 
the  rabbi’s  ideal.  Whoever  knows  any¬ 
thing  of  the  history  of  the  rabbi  in  Israel 
knows  this  much.  The  very  word  “rab¬ 
bi”,  which  means  “my  teacher,”  indi¬ 
cates  it.  Those  who  keep  on  deprecating 
scholarship  as  of  but  secondary  import¬ 
ance  in  rabbis,  certainly  are  at  variance 
with  the  traditional  ideal  of  the  Jew. 

100 


We  are  told  now  and  then  that  we  want 
“spiritual”  rabbis,  rather  than  “scholar¬ 
ly”  ones,  as  if  our  chief  trouble  were 
that  our  rabbis  are  suffering  from  ex¬ 
cess  of  learning!  Just  as  a  short  time 
ago  we  were  told  that  we  wanted  so¬ 
ciologists  as  rabbis.  But  what  is  this 
spirituality  demanded  by  the  new  mode? 
The  replies  are  as  vague  as  that  given 
by  the  old  Greek  sage  to  the  inquiring 
people  in  Goethe’s  poem.  “What  is  the 
so-called  spirit?”  ask  the  people.  And 
Cleobulus  answers:  “What  is  usually 
known  as  spirit ;  this  be  your  answer,  but 
do  not  ask.” 

“Was  ist  der  sogenannte  Geist?” 

“Was  man  so  Geist  gewohnlich  heisst, 

Antwortet,  aber  fragt  nicht.” 

The  spirituality  that  is  divorced  from 
the  scholarly  ideal  would,  upon  scrutiny, 
prove  itself  a  vapid  figment,  an  empty 
phrase. 

If  we  consult  such  a  classic  as  “The 
Chapters  of  the  Fathers”,  from  which 
scores  of  generations  of  Jews  have 
drawn  their  ideas  of  ethics  and  religion, 
we  shall  find  described  those  conditions 

101 


which,  according  to  Jewish  teaching, 
make  for  true  spirituality.  There  we 
find  the  teaching  of  Rabbi  Meir,  one  of 
the  foremost  talmudic  rabbis.  “Whoever 
occupies  himself  with  the  Torah,”  he 
tells  us,  “with  religious  study,  for  its 
own  sake,  and  not  for  the  sake  of  self¬ 
advancement  or  self-advertising,  gains 
many  things.  Nay,  he  is  worthy  of  the 
whole  world.  What  is  more,  it  clothes 
him  with  humility  and  godliness,  and 
qualifies  him  to  become  righteous,  saint¬ 
ly,  upright,  and  faithful.”  This  was 
Rabbi  Meir’s  idea  of  the  connection  be¬ 
tween  the  scholarly  disposition  and  prac¬ 
tice  with  spirituality.  And  his  view  is 
supported  by  the  teaching  of  another 
illustrious  rabbi.  Rabbi  Joshua  ben  Levi 
said:  “Every  day  a  divine  Voice  re¬ 
sounds  from  the  heights  of  Horeb,  pro¬ 
claiming:  Woe  to  human  beings  for  the 
neglect  of  the  Torah!  For,  whosoever 
neglects  the  Torah,  is  called  nazuph , 
gross,  despised,  swine-like!” 

Love  of  learning,  thus,  has  always 
been  inherent  to  Israel’s  rabbis.  But 
with  Jellinek  it  had  more  than  academic 
value.  He  realized  that  knowledge  was 

102 


necessary  to  the  self-respect  of  the  Jew, 
to  his  spiritual  and  ethical  well-being, 
and  to  his  proper  appreciation  of  his 
own  religious  heritage.  For  this  reason, 
as  well  as  because  of  his  own  love  of 
study,  Jellinek  devoted  himself  assidu¬ 
ously  to  the  spread  of  Jewish  knowledge. 
He  edited  old  Jewish  manuscripts.  He 
gave  expositions  continuously  of  Jewish 
subjects.  He  founded  in  Vienna  a  col¬ 
lege  for  Jewish  study,  the  Bet  Ham- 
midrash,  in  which  some  of  the  most 
learned  men  of  the  day  taught  and  lec¬ 
tured,  such  as  Isaac  Hirsch  Weiss  and 
Meir  Friedmann,  from  both  of  whom 
works  of  rare  erudition  came  forth  in 
the  course  of  time,  from  the  former  the 
brilliant  “History  of  Jewish  Tradition”, 
a  study  of.  which  Dr.  Schechter,  the  au¬ 
thor’s  beloved  disciple,  gave  in  the  first 
series  of  his  “Studies  in  Judaism.”  He 
gave  particular  attention  to  works  on 
Midrash  and  Kabbalah,  the  great  spirit¬ 
ual  value  of  which  had  not  then  been 
widely  recognized.  He  devoted  time  and 
thought  to  the  religious  education  of  the 
young.  The  more  knowledge  of  Juda¬ 
ism,  he  felt,  the  better  for  the  Jew. 


But  there  was  still  another  side  to  the 
ideal  of  Jellinek.  It  was  to  gain  for  Juda¬ 
ism  the  proper  understanding  and  ap¬ 
preciation  of  the  non- Jewish  world. 

As  he  looked  about  him,  he  found 
among  non- Jews  many  errors  about  the 
religion  and  the  life  of  the  Jew.  What 
was  the  essence  of  Judaism?  What  were 
the  foundations  of  Jewish  life?  What 
were  the  Jewish  teachings  in  regard  to 
non- Jews?  These  were  some  of  the  ques¬ 
tions  concerning  which  the  most  confused 
and  false  notions  prevailed,  and  the  re¬ 
sult  was  twofold:  Christian  dislike  of 
Jews  and  the  Jew’s  loss  of  self-respect. 
To  the  removal  of  such  errors  Jellinek 
devoted  himself,  and  he  did  so  not  only 
for  the  sake  of  the  Jews,  but  also  of  non- 
Jews,  as  he  believed  that  there  never 
could  be  any  happiness  or  peace  among 
men  until  there  was  toleration  and  un¬ 
derstanding  among  the  devotees  of  dif¬ 
ferent  faiths,  and  especially  among  the 
followers  of  Judaism  and  of  the  religion 
that  sprang  from  it. 

He  was  one  of  the  foremost  preachers 
of  toleration  and  freedom,  and  he  never 
failed  to  bring  forward  the  universal 

104 


outlook  of  Judaism,  the  hope  expressed 
long  ago  by  the  prophet  Zephaniah  that 
the  day  would  come  when  all  people  shall 
be  turned  to  one  pure  language  and 
serve  God  with  one  consent. 

These  three  elements  formed  the  dom¬ 
inant  parts  of  Jellinek’s  ideal. 

Nor  can  one  read  his  writings  without 
admiring,  in  addition  to  his  eloquence 
and  learning,  the  zeal  and  persistency 
with  which  he  clung  to  his  task.  I  have 
said  that  Jellinek  was  regarded  as  the 
most  illustrious  Jewish  preacher  of  his 
time.  This  is  not  to  say  that  he  had  not 
his  critics,  nor  that  he  was  perfect.  The 
chances  are  he  had  his  faults;  it  is  cer¬ 
tain  he  was  criticized.  Some  criticized 
his  attire,  others,  the  way  he  wore  his 
beard,  still  others  called  him  vain,  though 
those  that  knew  him  best  have  testi¬ 
fied  that  he  was  the  humblest  of  men. 
But,  despite  criticism,  he  devoted  him¬ 
self  restlessly  to  the  pursuit  of  his  ideal, 
and  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  his  work 
not  only  was  a  blessing  to  his  contem¬ 
poraries,  but  is  destined  to  remain  a 

10S 


source  of  ennoblement  and  inspiration 
for  future  ages. 

And  we  need  his  influence  today.  To¬ 
day,  also,  we  need  a  new  realization  of 
the  adequacy  of  Judaism.  Today,  also, 
we  need  more  knowledge  of  Judaism. 
Today,  also,  we  need  a  better  understand¬ 
ing  between  Jew  and  non- Jew.  Let  us, 
therefore,  try  to  emulate  the  work  and 
perpetuate  the  ideal  of  Adolf  Jellinek! 


X 


THE  JEW  AND  THE  WORLD 

( For  Shabuoth) 

“And  the  remnant  of  Jacob  shall  be  in 
the  midst  of  many  peoples  as  dew  from 
the  Lord,  as  showers  upon  the  grass.” 

— Micah  5,  6. 

THE  Bible  relates  that  when  the  Law 
was  about  to  be  given  to  Israel,  the 
people  were  told  to  prepare  them¬ 
selves  by  special  observance  for  its  re¬ 
ception.  For  two  days  they  were  bidden 
to  sanctify  themselves,  so  that  on  the 
third  day  they  might  be  fit  for  the  great 
event.  No  less  today,  on  the  eve  of  the 
Feast  of  Shabuoth,  it  behoves  us  to  con¬ 
centrate  upon  the  thoughts  associated 
with  this  festival. 

Shabuoth,  from  of  yore,  has  been  ob¬ 
served  as  the  day  of  the  giving  of  the 
Law.  An  old  rabbi  called  it  the  spiritual 
birthday  of  the  Jewish  people.  In  mod¬ 
ern  times  it  has  become  the  occasion  for 
Confirmation,  when  many  young  people 
dedicate  themselves  to  the  continuance 
of  Israel’s  history  and  purpose.  Might 

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we  not  pause  to  ask  ourselves  what  the 
Jew’s  place  has  really  been  in  the  world, 
what  he  has  accomplished,  or  at  least 
sought  to  accomplish,  since  first  he  en¬ 
tered  upon  his  spiritual  existence,  and 
whether  his  past  really  warrants  the 
dedication  of  his  modern  offspring  to  the 
maintenance  of  his  name  and  place 
among  men? 

If  ever  there  was  reason  for  such  in¬ 
quiry,  there  certainly  is  at  present. 

For,  within  the  last  couple  of  years, 
we  have  heard  a  good  deal  of  discussion 
regarding  the  Jew’s  place  in  the  world; 
and  much  of  it  in  hostile  tone.  This  is 
one  of  the  evil  effects  of  the  war,  which, 
contrary  to  general  expectation,  has 
brought  about,  in  addition  to  an  untold 
amount  of  physical  suffering,  a  good 
deal  of  ethical  upheaval.  There  has  been 
a  renewal  of  the  old  assaults  upon  the 
character  and  the  history  of  the  Jew, 
and  in  various  quarters  efforts  are  made 
to  depict  the  Jew  as  detrimental  to  civi¬ 
lization  and  his  further  existence  as  a 
menace  to  mankind. 

And  the  worst  result  of  these  asper¬ 
sions  is  its  effect  upon  a  considerable 

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number  of  Jews.  It  fills  them  with  dis¬ 
may.  It  puts  into  their  hearts  the  seed 
of  doubt  and  self-distrust.  It  serves  to 
blind  them  to  the  glories  of  their  own 
past  and  post.  While  many  Jews  are 
fortified  in  their  loyalty  by  antagonism, 
quite  a  few  are  frightened  by  the  con¬ 
stant  reiteration  of  its  charges.  It  is 
fortunate,  therefore,  that  every  now  and 
then  something  occurs  which,  like  Sha- 
buoth,  reminds  us  of  the  Jew’s  true  his¬ 
tory  and  helps  us  to  appraise  correctly 
his  place  and  achievement  in  the  world. 

At  such  a  time  as  this  the  chief  merit 
of  Shabuoth  is  that  it  reminds  us  of  the 
Jew’s  most  important  contribution  to 
the  weal  and  the  progress  of  mankind. 

For,  it  commemorates  the  Jew’s  con¬ 
scious  acceptance  of  the  Divine  Law,  of 
the  Burden  of  the  Torah.  Of  course, 
there  were  Jews  before  the  event  of 
Sinai.  Also,  there  are  those  who  doubt 
the  historicity  of  that  event.  But  these 
points  are  of  relatively  small  import¬ 
ance.  That  there  came  a  time  in  the 
course  of  Jewish  development  when  the 
people  dedicated  themselves  to  the  Law, 
to  the  cause  of  Righteousness,  to  Reli- 

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gion,  this  is  of  supreme  moment,  and, 
moreover,  that  thereby  the  Jew  was 
destined  to  give  to  mankind  the  greatest 
help  in  the  pursuit  of  happiness  and  the 
mightiest  incentive  to  ethical  and  spirit¬ 
ual  ennoblement. 

These  facts  of  Jewish  history  nothing 
can  obscure,  nobody  can  efface  or  deny. 
Suppose  we  are  informed  that  latter-day 
research  has  discovered  among  Assyri¬ 
ans  and  Babylonians  and  Egyptians  the 
existence  of  laws  and  lore  similar  to 
those  found  in  the  Bible.  Suppose  we 
are  apprised  that  here  and  there  we  find 
ethical  precepts  and  religious  beliefs  ap¬ 
proximating  or  foreshadowing  those  of 
the  Jews!  Does  this  alter  the  one  out¬ 
standing  fact,  namely,  that  as  far  as  the 
world  is  concerned,  it  got  its  sublimest 
religious  teachings  and  most  compulsive 
moral  laws  from  the  Jew?  Not  a  whit! 
The  Bible  mankind  received  from  the 
Jew,  and  with  the  Bible  all  those  spirit¬ 
ual  and  ethical  ideals  which  form  its 
fabric.  And  while  men  as  yet  have  not 
realized  the  ideals  of  the  Bible,  those 
ideals  still  constitute  their  most  persist¬ 
ent  monition  and  pattern. 

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Nor  is  the  Jew’s  contribution  to  the 
riches  of  the  world  exhausted  by  what 
he  did  in  the  beginning,  by  the  creation 
of  the  Bible.  The  Jew’s  history  reveals 
the  fact  that  he  never  ceased  producing 
men  who  sought  to  develop  and  incar¬ 
nate  the  spirit  of  the  Bible. 

Recently  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  gave  us  a 
stimulating  new  book  on  “The  Salvaging 
of  Civilization”.  Mr.  Wells  pleads  for  a 
new  Bible.  The  old  Bible,  he  admits, 
has  had  a  wonderful  influence  over  the 
lives  and  minds  of  men.  It  has  been  the 
book  that  has  held  together  the  fabric 
of  Western  civilization.  It  has  been  the 
handbook  of  life  to  countless  millions  of 
men  and  women.  The  civilization  we 
possess  could  not  have  come  into  exist¬ 
ence  and  could  not  have  been  sustained 
without  it.  The  Bible  was  the  cement  by 
which  our  Western  communities  were 
built  and  by  which  they  were  held  to¬ 
gether.  All  this  Mr.  Wells  affirms.  But 
one  reason  why  he  pleads  for  a  new 
Bible  of  Civilization  is  that  the  old  Bible 
“breaks  off”,  as  he  puts  it. 

Ill 


But  just  here  we  discern  the  distinc¬ 
tion  of  the  Jew.  His  Bible  never  broke 
off.  He  never  regarded  the  written 
Bible  as  all-sufficient.  The  Oral  Law,  he 
affirmed,  was  given  at  the  same  time  as 
the  Written  Law,  and  to  develop,  ex¬ 
pound,  and  incarnate  the  Written  Law 
by  the  aid  of  the  Oral  Law  became  the 
chief  task  of  his  spiritual  leaders 
throughout  the  ages.  Indeed,  some  rab¬ 
bis  held  that  the  unfoldment  of  the  Oral 
Tradition  was  more  important  than  that 
of  the  Written  Law,  and  that  the  pos¬ 
session  of  the  Unwritten  Bible  formed 
the  real  distinction  of  Israel.  Ekhtob  lo 
rube  torothi  kemo  zor  nehshabu :  “Had  I 
written  down  for  him  the  greater  part 
of  My  Torah,  there .  would  have  been 
nothing  to  mark  him  off  from  the  rest 
of  the  world” — the  Lord  said,  according 
to  the  rabbis,  in  the  words  of  the  Proph¬ 
et  Hosea.  It  is  of  the  Unwritten  Bible, 
as  well  as  of  the  written  Bible,  that  the 
Jew  was  made  custodian. 

This  is  why  Jewish  history  is  full  of 
great  personalities,  some  of  whom  are 
among  the  foremost  teachers  of  man- 

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kind.  Think  of  Philo,  of  Hillel,  of  Ibn 
Gebirol,  Maimonides,  Spinoza,  Mendels¬ 
sohn..  Or  think  of  Jesus!  Whatever 
Jews  may  think  of  him,  or  Christians, 
he  was  a  Jew,  and  it  was  the  Jewish 
Bible  that  he  sought  in  his  own  way  to 
vivify  and  embody. 

Nor  is  it  merely  in  the  world  of  reli¬ 
gious  teaching  or  philosophic  thought 
that  we  find  outstanding  Jewish  person¬ 
alities;  we  face  them  in  every  other 
sphere  of  life,  and  especially  among  the 
leaders  of  social  reform.  That  passion 
for  social  justice  and  mercy  which  in  the 
Bible  found  expression  in  Isaiah  and 
Amos,  often  flamed  up  anew  in  sons  and 
daughters  of  Israel,  who,  however  mis¬ 
judged,  may  yet  come  to  be  counted 
among  the  benefactors  of  mankind.  No 
wonder  Hermann  Keyserling,  the  Ger¬ 
man  philosopher,  in  his  “ Journal  of  a 
Philosopher's  Travels",  admits  that  if 
any  people  has  a  right  to  regard  itself 
as  a  Chosen  People,  it  is  the  Jews.  For, 
he  says,  “their  belief  is  the  basis  of 
Christianity  and  Islam  and  thus  indi¬ 
rectly  rules  the  world,  and  they  them¬ 
selves,  despite  oppression  and  disdain, 

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have  never  degenerated  as  a  people,  and 
even  today,  most  of  the  spiritual  leaders 
of  Europe  belong  to  them.” 

And  this  leads  us  to  another  thought. 

Not  only  by  his  distinguished  per¬ 
sonalities  and  his  Bible  has  the  Jew  justi¬ 
fied  himself  in  the  world.  He  has  done 
so  as  a  people.  The  unique  merit  o± 
Moses,  it  has  been  said,  lay  not  so  much 
in  that  he  created  a  religion  for  a  people, 
as  in  that  he  created  a  people  for  Re¬ 
ligion.  The  Jewish  people  has  been  the 
champion  of  Religion  in  the  world. 
Through  its  Prophets  it  became  the 
Prophet  People.  And  what  is  the  one 
great  lesson  taught  by  the  history  of  the 
Jewish  people?  It  is  the  lesson  of  the 
supremacy  of  spiritual  force  over  the 
material  forces.  How  great  the  marvel 
of  the  Jew’s  survival!  He  has  been  op¬ 
pressed,  maligned,  outraged;  and  still  he 
lives.  But  the  secret  of  his  survival  is 
the  spiritual  ideal  to  which  he  is  dedi¬ 
cated. 

When  at  Sinai  the  Israelites  exclaimed, 
All  that  the  Lord  hath  said  we  shall  do 
and  try  to  understand  (says  an  ancient 

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rabbi),  the  Lord  summoned  the  Angel  of 
Death  and  said  to  him,  Everything  is  in 
thy  power,  except  this  people !  Kol  ha-olam 
b’reshuthekha  huts  min  ha-uma  hazzoth. 

The  whole  history  of  the  Jew  proves 
the  superior  worth  of  spiritual  ideals. 
By  them  the  Jew  has  survived.  By  them 
he  became  immortal.  “The  law  of  Thy 
mouth,”  cried  the  Psalmist,  “is  better 
for  me  than  thousands  of  gold  and  sil¬ 
ver!”  “For  the  reason,”  comment  the 
ancient  rabbis,  “that  gold  and  silver,  ma¬ 
terial  ambitions,  drive  man  out  of  the 
world,  while  the  Torah,  spiritual  ideal¬ 
ism,  secures  for  him  both  this  world  and 
the  world  to  come.” 

When  we  think  of  the  history  of  the 
Jew,  we  realize  how  false  are  the  charges 
leveled  against  him  and  what  right  we 
have  to  be  proud  of  the  place  of  the  Jew 
in  the  world. 

“And  every  stone  becomes  a  gem 
Reflected  in  the  beams  divine; 

Blown  back,  they  blind  the  mocking  eye, 

But  still  in  Israel’s  paths  they  shine.” 

There  was  never  a  time  when  the 
world  needed  more  than  today  the  lofty 

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ideals  which  the  Jew  set  before  it,  which 
his  great  personalities  sought  to  advance 
and  perpetuate,  and  which  his  people  has 
lived  for.  Renewal  of  the  spirit  of  the 
Bible, — this  the  world  needs  today  rather 
than  a  new  Bible.  It  needs  a  new  birth 
of  the  spirit  of  Righteousness  which  shall 
lead  to  true  brotherhood  and  unification. 
It  needs  men  and  women  devoted  to  the 
unfolding  and  accomplishing  of  the  true 
purpose  of  Religion.  It  needs  the  ex¬ 
altation  of  spiritual  ideals  over  material 
ambitions.  Let  us  hope,  therefore,  that 
the  young  who  now  dedicate  themselves 
to  Israel's  ancient  faith  may  be  able  to 
promote  these  ideals  and  thus  prove 
themselves  an  honor  to  their  people  and 
a  blessing  to  mankind. 

“And  there  shall  be  no  more 
a  pricking  brier  unto  the  house 
of  Israel,  nor  a  piercing  thorn 
of  any  that  are  round  about 
them,  that  did  have  them  in 
disdain;  and  they  shall  know 
that  I  am  the  Lord  God." 


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